The Eye of Love Read Free

whispered Dolores.
    â€œRemember those young devils who started to unwrap me?”
    â€œIt didn’t matter. You’d pyjamas underneath …”
    â€œI shall never forget how wonderful you looked, pulling me out of the cardboard …”
    â€œI couldn’t bear to see you laughed at,” murmured Dolores. “You were too big …”
    They had revived the moment many times before, but never so tenderly.
    â€œThen we danced together all the rest of the evening.”
    â€œOf the night,” corrected Dolores.
    â€œAnd then I lost you.”
    â€œI got held up in the Cloaks.”
    â€œAnd then I found you again. What a chance that was!—Just popping in to buy a tie, and there you were!”
    â€œI’m sorry, Harry, but I can’t bear it,” said Dolores.
    She huddled closer against his solid chest. It was his solidness she’d always loved, as he her exotic frailty. For ten years they’d given each other what each most wanted from life: romance. Now both were middle-aged, and if they looked and sounded ridiculous, it was the fault less of themselves than of time.
    To be fair to Time, each had been pretty ridiculous even at the Chelsea Ball. Miss Diver, in her second or third year as a Spanish Dancer, was already known to aficionados as Old Madrid. Mr Gibson, who had never attended before, found the advertised bohemianism more bohemian than he’d bargained for. To the young devils from the Slade, unwrapping him, his humiliated cries promised bare buff rather than pyjamas. Naked, indeed, he might have made headlines by being arrested; in neat Vyella, he was merely absurd …
    Dolores, Old Madrid, not only pitied his condition but also lacked a partner. She’d have been glad to dance with anyone, all the rest of the night. But though rooted in such unlikely soil their love had proved a true plant of Eden, flourishing and flowering, and shading from the heat of the day—not Old Madrid and Harry Gibson, but King Hal and his Spanish rose.
    So they had rapidly identified each other—he so big and bluff, she so dark and fragile: as King Hal and his Spanish rose. Of all the couples who danced that night in the Albert Hall, they were probably the happiest.
    â€œI can’t help it,” sobbed Dolores. “I mean remembering, now …”
    â€œPoor old girl,” said Mr Gibson.
    He didn’t even eye the whisky. It was an effort, but he didn’t. Instead he arranged Miss Diver more comfortably against his shoulder, and got out his handkerchief.—He could have used it himself, but for the strong-man rôle it was necessary for him to play.
    Dolores didn’t use the handkerchief either. She used, to Mr Gibson most touchingly, the fringe of her Spanish shawl.
    â€œHarry …”
    â€œYes, old girl?”
    â€œI do understand, truly I do. I’m not going to make a fuss. But just because you’re marrying to save the business—”
    â€œTo amalgamate it,” corrected Mr Gibson.
    â€œTo amalgamate it, then—need we, must we—?”
    He pressed her closer, but she knew what the answer was. Indeed, she almost at once felt ashamed of her question. Mr Gibson’s principles, or some of them, were high: certain of them rose like peaks from a low range—or rather like the mesas of a Mexican desert, that astonish travellers by their abruptness. He had never, for example, invited Dolores to assume his name, or even the married title, because he had such a respect for legal matrimony. “We’ll keep everything above-board,” said Mr Gibson. This did not prevent his concealing Miss Diver’s existence from, for example again, his mother, under whose roof he continued to sleep five nights out of seven. Dolores was the romance in his life, its wonder and beauty for which he never ceased to be grateful; but the domestic gods still governed half his soul.
    â€œI’m sorry,”