To love and to honor by Emilie Baker Loring Read Free Book Online Page A

you?"
    "She asked for it. I'll bet her tennis doesn't touch yours. Something tells me that life here will have its points while I wait for you to be free. Relax. I won't say any more. Just want you to realize why I am here, that no green-eyed Circe can come between us. Where shall we lunch? Remember I am from the interior, and make it lobster. Sea air has made me ravenous. After that we'll paint the Maine shore red and I mean red."
    After lunch at the Lobster Pound they stopped at the Country Club to watch the tennis. Cindy went into the house to make out a guest card for Tom Slade. When she returned he was surrounded by the female of the species dating him for games.

    In a car which was the last word in smartness, performance and speed, they skimmed along black roads bordered in places by thickets of sumac and sassafras; the pale gold and purple of goldenrod and asters; past cultivated fields where sleek, well-fed black and white COWS placidly chewed their cuds; by neglected fields coming up in broom sedge grass. From a towering pine the noisy "Caw! Cawl" of a crow convention rent the air. Past rocky shores, echoing with the thunder of white-capped breakers, beyond which stretched an illimitable expanse of sapphire blue and dark green ocean. A briny breeze stirred Cindy's short hair and tugged at Slade's luridly hand-painted tie.
    He talked of his ambition politically, of his hopes and plans for the future, of her part in them. She interrupted:
    "Not now, Tom, don't talk about me now. I asked you not to come here till the annulment of that crazy marriage had been granted. Your presence may start unpleasant conjecture. I don't want that. If you stay there is to be no mention of love or marriage between us."
    "O.K., that's so like you. You won't drink or smoke or play cards for even a penny a corner, but you're the girl I want. I'll be cagey and concentrate on the dames at the Inn, only don't run away with the idea I've gone cold on you. Are you afraid that guy Damon—the snappy Lydia nailed his identity for fair, I guess there's no doubt he is here to represent the absent groom—will report to Stewart if we are seen together a lot and tie up the release?"
    *'No. Ken Stewart wants his freedom. During the years since the marriage by contract I have given no one a chance to gossip about me—you know I wouldn't go out with you unless others were in the party."
    "Do I know it? You bet I do. In spite of the chaperons we had a lot of fun. Remember the roller-skate parties? The prizes we copped for our act?"
    "I do. There is a rink a few miles from here, highly respectable, in fact verging on to|>drawer. I've been

    planning to go there some day. My skates are in the turret room at The Castle."
    "Remembering the fun we had, I brought mine on the chance there would be a place to use them. We'll smash a few more records with our turns and whirls."
    "Meanwhile, play with the attractive girls at the Inn, give them the time of their lives."
    "Suppose I fall for one of them?"
    "All right with me. Better now than later."
    "Jupiter, you're a hard-boiled critter, Cindy."
    The bracelet man had said that, only he had called her a female, not a critter.
    "I don't see why? Because I intend to have my next marriage—if there is one—of the 'till death do us part' kind?"
    "That makes it unanimous."
    They dined and danced. Stopped for a late snack. It was midnight when Cindy softly closed the front door of The Castle behind her. She listened till the purr of Tom Slade's convertible faded in the distance, then turned the shaded lamp in the hall to low and crossed to the stairs. Foot on the bottom step she stopped.
    Why go up now? She wouldn't sleep if she went to bed. Her mind was in a hectic tangle, mussed like the drawer of her dresser when she had searched it in a hurry. More sensible to curl up on the chaise longue in the patio while she tried to restore order to the impressions of the last twelve hours.
    She tiptoed through the hall. Sarah