Such is love Read Free

four—except that one could not measure age by years alone. For instance, she had felt forty or fifty when she dragged her way back to Aunt Eleanor at the end of those tragic few weeks.
    It was hard to recollect now just how she had stammered out the story. It took a very long while, because Aunt Eleanor refused to understand implications. One had to give the whole thing in black and white.
    At the end, she had just remarked bitterly, like some absurd character in a goody-goody story:
    "Then all these weeks you have been living in sin?"
    'T thought I was married," Gwyneth had said faintly, but Aunt Eleanor merely repeated:
    "You have been living in sin." And, in the end, Gwyneth had to admit that she had.
    Aunt Eleanor sent her to bed after that—^whether on health grounds or as a punishment, Gwyneth had never been able to decide. Aunt Eleanor would see nothing in-

    congruous in banishing an erring niece to bed, even if that niece had grown up sufficiently to live with a man as his wife for several weeks.
    Gwyneth had lain there all that dreary evening, in the room where she had dreamed such romantic, heart-warming dreams. Yes—still this very same room where her wedding dress now hung, ready for her to wear when she married Van on Thursday.
    Very late in the evening Aunt Eleanor had come and asked if she were awake, and Gwyneth, who felt she would never sleep again, admitted in a whisper that she was.
    "We have got to decide what we are going to do about this terrible business." Sitting there in the half-light, Aunt Eleanor had looked absurdly unhke a conspirator—but she proved herself a masterly tactician.
    "I have written absolutely nothing to your parents about your wicked running away," Aunt Eleanor announced. "So far as they are concerned, you have never left home."
    "They—know—nothing?" she gasped, hardly daring to put the discovery into words. "Oh, Aunt Eleanor, how good of you! How wonderfully good of you!"
    "It was not for your sake that I kept silent," Aunt Eleanor told her sharply. "It was for my poor brother, whose heart would certainly be broken if he knew what you have been doing." She said a great deal more about her brother's broken heart, though nothing at all about Gwyneth's. But perhaps that vvas understandable.
    "The servants think you were away on an unexpected visit. At least, I have told them that," Aunt Eleanor added, with a grimness that would have forbidden speculation. "The few friends who inquired were told the same thing. I have sent what excuses I could to your parents for your not having written, and I hope you have not been such a fool as to write to them."
    "No," Gwyneth whispered. "I waited to see what attitude they wanted to take."
    "Thank God," Aunt Eleanor said, and she meant it quite literally. She thanked Him sincerely for having looked after her affairs so well, and for having inspired her niece with a grain of sense in all this welter of sinful absurdity.
    "Then—nobody really knows?" Gwyneth lay back again, feeling very weak and queer.

    "Nobody—except you and me."
    "Aunt Eleanor, can it really—remain like that?'*
    "So long as you have the good sense to hold your tongue,** was the sharp retort. "/ shall certainly not go tattling about anything so disgraceful. How the daughter of your father
    and mother could jever have come to such a pass " She
    broke off, because words did indeed fail to clothe her surprise and fury. Gwyneth closed her eyes, in order to shut out her aunt's hard, angry expression.
    "Your parents will be home in a fortnight's time,'* Aunt Eleanor's voice informed her warningly. "I had a letter from them yesterday. By that time, I hope you will have contrived to look your usual self again."
    So she had two weeks in which to grow back to the unknowing seventeen-year-old who had never even been kissed—let alone lain in a man's arms, learning passion and desire, and disillusionment.
    And she managed it. Incredible though it seemed, she had played the part