The Heart Remembers Read Free Page A

with beyond it the handsome, commodious quarters of the publisher.”
    Shelley caught her breath and her hands were clenched so tightly in her lap that the gloves were strained above her knuckles. The little brick building had a grimy window on which the words: “
Harbour Pines Journal
: Job-Printing” were barely legible.
    Weeds and grass and the debris of many years neglect was piled all about it, half smothering the path to the little house. The small windows were tightly shut, but here and there a shutter was hanging loose, so that the little old house seemed to peer out of half closed lids, like a very old, very sick person who has given up all hope.
    A gaunt old apple tree or two at the back lifted greening limbs above decayed wood. In the front a young peach tree had grown riotously and its small,furry buds were beginning to show traces of pink through the tight-folded outer leaves. A few rose bushes, still valiant after years of neglect, were shaking out small, hopeful clusters of reddish leaves above the rank grass and weeds.
    There was the sting of tears in Shelley’s eyes as she looked and looked, forgetting for the moment the tall, rangy young man who sat beside her. The printing shop was smaller than she remembered it, and the little house looked so sad and so shabby. But she had been a child when she saw it last, she reminded herself. The windows of the little house had been bright and shining, and crisp ruffled curtains had blown in the spring breeze; and the garden had rioted with daffodils and hyacinths and old-fashioned shrubs such as spirea and forsythia and flowering quince. And the roses had been newly planted and vigorously blooming.
    â€œStill think you want to stay?”
    Jim’s voice crashed into her mood of bittersweet remembering and she had to set her teeth before she could make herself answer him.
    â€œOf course. Thank you very much for giving me a lift.” She started to open the car door, but Jim put out a hand and held the catch, looking at her in startled protest.
    â€œOh, for Pete’s sake, you haven’t any crazy idea of staying here tonight?”
    â€œThe house is furnished; they told me so in Atlanta when I bought—”
    â€œI suppose it is, after a fashion. But it’s been shut up for fifteen years. I hardly think you’ll find it livable,” he all but snapped at her. “I’ve been racking what I loosely call my brain for the last ten miles trying to think where you are to stay until the place can be put in order. That is, if you’re still determined to stay.”
    â€œI certainly am, and I’m sure I can get a room atthe hotel.”
    â€œPardon me while I burst into raucous laughter, my benighted young friend,” Jim’s tone was definitely acid. “There isn’t a hotel nearer than the county seat and that’s eighteen miles. And there isn’t so much as a boarding-house in Harbour Pines. So the only thing to do with you is take you home with me.”
    Shelley gasped and stared at him. “Oh,
no!
”
    He surveyed her, slightly acrid amusement in his dark eyes.
    â€œMy dear girl,” he assured her loftily, as though he were beginning to be a little bored with her, “I assure you that I am merely following the ancient law of hospitality in these parts; I am
not
making a pass at you. I live with my spinster aunt on the other side of town in a house so big that the two of us rattle around in it. It’s the only house in miles that runs to a spare bedroom and I assure you that Aunt Selena will be delighted to have you.”
    Shelley’s teeth set down hard on her lower lip and her body was rigid. Selena! It couldn’t be, yet there couldn’t be more than one woman with that name in this little town. But
her
name was Selena Durand, not Hargroves!
    â€œSelena?” she said thinly after a long moment. “It’s an unusual name.”
    â€œMy aunt is an unusual