Kissing Kin by Elswyth Thane

acknowledging her obstinacy with a little foolish gesture of both hands.
    “Wait five years,” said Sally. “And meanwhile, take Camilla over to the Hall and show her everything.”
    “I’d be glad to,” said Jenny at once. “She could come back with Archie and me in the morning and I’ll find a way to get her home during the day. Can you ride a bicycle?” she asked Camilla, who nodded. “Then you can borrow mine to ride home. It’s only a couple of miles by the lane.”
    Camilla accepted gratefully, aware that they were devising something to occupy her mind until Bracken could be heard from, but willing to be stage-managed to that end. She had no desire to worry and wonder and wait alone. And during the visit to the Hall there would be less time to think of Sosthène as well. Already she was counting on Jenny to save her—Jenny, who had somehow saved herself from one of the worst humiliations a woman can bear, and could still smile and make jokesand hold her head high. Camilla hoped also to see Fabrice at the Hall. She was shamelessly curious now about the girl who could take a man away from Jenny. Any man. Gerald, as Gerald, didn’t really matter. Gerald was only the pawn. The players were the now unimaginable French girl, Fabrice, and the little aristocrat across the hearth who had lost. Or had she lost? Nothing worth having, surely. But she thought she had, that was the thing. Whatever Gerald was worth, himself, Jenny had taken the beating. And Jenny deserved the best. Even Calvert would not be too good for Jenny…. I’m match-making already, thought Camilla. Well, it would be nice. For everybody. I’d like Jenny for a sister…. I never thought to say that about anybody….

    Camilla was able to accept the offer of Jenny’s companionship overnight with the same simplicity with which it was offered. They had dined late, and by the time Sally had drunk her coffee and sipped her grand mariner in front of the drawing-room fire the clocks were striking ten, which was the time she usually retired to her room. Sosthène always accompanied her up the stairs, her hand in his elbow, and was not himself seen again until breakfast. Virginia, after tactfully providing them with adjoining rooms, had tried not to indulge in impertinent speculation regarding so early a disappearance of two people who seemed unlikely to require approximately eleven hours sleep each night. Once, prowling the passage in the small hours caring for a sick child, she had seen light under Cousin Sally’s door and had distinctly heard the murmur of Sosthène’s voice—reading aloud.
    To Camilla, Sosthène’s contented early departure from the drawing-room was the last devastation of a bludgeoning day, and she was left alone with Jenny in front of the fire under a weight of depression too crushing for tears, her gnawing anxiety about Calvert complicated by a guilty preoccupation with the absorbing stranger whose mere presence had seemed to hold her together and ward off a childish collapse into premature grief and panic. While Sosthène was there she had to behave well. Now that he was gone, disappointment descended on top of apprehension, until it seemed she could not breathe, and the long night was still to be got through. But how wicked, thought Camilla, how heartless and depraved, to allow the sharp edge of her fear for Calvert’s life to be gummed up with thoughts about anyone else, about a person Calvert had never even seen, a person who was nothing to her, nor ever could be….
    “You don’t feel like going up to bed yet, do you,” Jenny was saying, and Camilla shook her head gratefully though she had had a long day herself and would have known, if she had stopped to think, that Jenny must have been up before six that morning. “Shall we turn on the gramophone? Or would you rather play cards? I know just how you feel, but you’ll get your second wind pretty soon, I can promise. The thing is just to keep going till that happens,