The Mulberry Bush by Helen Topping Miller Read Free Book Online

lawnmower and the mortgage would always be a dream house—and then she remembered that she had forgotten to put Mike’s money in the bank and clutched up her purse in a panic, rummaging frantically until she felt the flat packet with the rubber bands again.
    And then it was somehow morning, and the plane was going down somewhere in the Middle West, and the passengers began bustling their luggage together, when the stewardess came with in apologetic face.
    â€œI’m sorry—this is an emergency-landing field. We’re having a little engine trouble, and the pilots thought it best to land. But there will be only a short delay. We’ll be picked up by another plane almost immediately.”
    A very tall and very brown man with white sunlines around his eyes turned around and smiled at Virginia. He must have come aboard in the night, for she was sure she had not seen him before. She would not have forgotten that interesting, challenging face.
    â€œWe’re lucky, at that,” he said, “landing right side up and nobody hurt. Like to see the St. Louis paper?” he asked as the plane jolted to a gentle landing. “We’ll probably have a wait here—and not a hot-dog stand in sight.”
    â€œThank you.” Virginia took the paper and turned at once to Mike’s column. But it was one he had written in New York, about immigrant women at Ellis Island, and she had read it before, fresh from the snapping teeth of Elvira.
    But next to it was the column of a gossip-snooper whom Mike detested, and she ran her eyes rapidly over that. A squib halfway down caught her eyes, and she sat rigidly, cold all over, reading it:
    The churchyard sparrows are tattling that a certain famous columnist got himself merged of a Saturday to a red-headed gal from the ol’ South. What about that black-haired newspaper gal in New York? She has a ring. Tch! Tch!

Chapter 5
    She read the item three times through, a queer tightening at her temples, her hands dry and cold and unsteady.
    It couldn’t be—it was someone else—but it had to be, it was so obvious. Someone had recognized Mike—the minister? No, she was certain that to that kind old man she had been only one more vaguely identified bride, Mike one more indefinite, nervous groom. He had had to ask them their names twice.
    â€œBut I,” she thought, trying to make things come clear and fall into order in the stunned confusion of her mind, “am certainly red-headed and from the South.”
    But who was the newspaper girl who had black hair and a ring? Mike had never talked about his past—she realized that Mike had told her almost nothing. Of his work, of the places he had seen and the dangers he had faced—a little of that passed over lightly. But of Michael Paull, of his personal life, practically nothing at all. Even the little she had learned about his father, his family, had been accidentally disclosed.
    â€œWhy,” she was thinking in consternation, “I don’t know Mike at all! I didn’t ask him—perhaps he thought I wasn’t interested. But he didn’t ask me either. He doesn’t know anything about my family. He wouldn’t know my father’s name or where to send a message if I died—and neither would I, if something happened to him.”
    It was as if she and Mike had begun living when first they met, wiping all the past away, forgetting it entirely. And that was right, that was the way for a marriage to begin. But now here was Mike’s past leering horridly from black type, refusing to be forgotten.
    It doesn’t matter—it’s all ended—it doesn’t matter—if it had been important, Mike would have told me about it. . . . She struggled with her inner, prickly unease, trying to convince herself that it did not matter, really. Trying to put away thoughts of Mike’s casual disregard of other people, of other claims, his bland and blithe