Ever After by Elswyth Thane Page A

with just the same attentive concern . His lingering gaze, so unlike Sedgwick’s in everything but a sort of wistful adhesiveness, drove her own steady eyes more than once to her plate or to some distant point inthe room. She didn’t dare look at Bracken or Virginia, for she felt in them an increasing alertness, a sort of suppressed expectancy which embarrassed and confused her. Sue had never been courted before—poor Sedgwick had hardly had time to begin before that terrible day when Ransom had told them it was impossible, and then everything had been over for them. But Sue had the born writer’s sixth sense about things which lay outside her personal experience, part intuition, part atavistic memory. She had written love scenes inher books, and apart from Sedgwick she knew, in her cultivated imagination, how a man in love behaves. And the Major, apart from the champagne, was behaving besottedly.
    Small as her worldly experience had been, by the time she went to bed that night at Claridge’s Sue was forced to recognize that by some freak of male nature, the Major was very much taken with her astonished self. She had done nothing, she was sure, to bring such a thing to pass. She had minded her own business entirely, while Virginia tried her best to flirt with him. Well, then. But the Major, incredibly, was not interested in Virginia. It was to Virginia’s Aunt Susannah that his seeking, tell-tale eyes returned again and again. And Sue’s reactions came in a rather unexpected sequence. But he doesn’t know anything about me, she thought first. But I must be years older than he is, she thought next. And then, belatedly—But no one could ever take Sedgie’s place.
    Their engagement calendar by then left little room for additions before Easter, but the Major did turn up, looking more than pleased with himself, at several social functions to which they also had been invited. Once, at a tea in Grosvenor Street, he arrived in a group of officers who had been to the Palace for an investiture, wearing full dress uniform and blazing with decorations. He was modesty itself under the smitten stares of Sue and Virginia. But somewhere at the back of his level eyes, in the laughter-wrinkles at their corners, there lurked the look of the cat with canary feathers sticking to its whiskers; he was caught, but the bird was inside—Sue had seen him at his best, wearing the uniform he loved.
    They did go again to dinner and the theatre with him. He had got tickets to the new Savoy opera this time, where Mr. George Grossmith was behaving characteristically as the highly improbable king of a highly impossible country called Vingolia. Never having seen Gilbert and Sullivan, Sue never missed them from this imitation product, and Virginia had long adored the agile Mr. Grossmith.

    On the Thursday before Easter Sunday, Bracken and Sue and Virginia descended from the train at the little station of Upper Briarly on Cotswold—it was the line which ran from London to Oxford to Worcester, and so the service had proved surprisingly good for so remote a place. They found the Major, wearing well-aged tweeds, waiting with a carriage and pair driven by a coachman in his aunt’s brown livery. He had left Town a few days before them in order to see that Mrs. Poole had done everything necessary, and he was determined to entertain his guests in style if it took a year’s pay.
    They drove across the wold at sundown to the village of Upper Briarly, which was a mile and three-quarters from its railway station, in a fold of the hills where the infant river Windrush ran. The road was built of yellowish Cotswold stone, and low stone dry-walls bordered it on either side, enclosing green fields where black-faced lambs frisked on match-stick legs. The fruit trees were in bloom—snowy pear and plum, and pink peach blossoms in the sheltered corners of the farmyards. The hedgerows were freshly green, and poplars and chestnuts were leafing, though oak and elm were