Kissing Kin by Elswyth Thane Page B

the Hall a concert some time.”
    Camilla said she’d like very much to sing for them if they cared about that sort of thing.
    “They’d love it,” Jenny assured her. “They’re the best audience in the world, and they’re sick of all my tricks, they’ve seen them so often, you must come and perform for them. We’re planning a lot of doings around Christmas-time, and we’ll need your help.”
    Camilla said she’d be glad to be of some use.
    “Good,” said Jenny. “Some of us are going to dress up and play the fool, they always love that, but they know good music when they hear it. You must brush up on all your Southern American songs because that would be a novelty for them— My Old Kentucky Home, and all that. You don’t happen to play a banjo, do you?”
    “Calvert does,” said Camilla wistfully.
    “Well, who knows, we might have him here by then! Tell me, shan’t we skip down to the kitchen and make some cocoa and have it here in front of the fire before we go to bed?”
    “Yes, let’s,” said Camilla, and set her teeth against a resurgenttightness in her throat and a stinging in her eyelids, and followed Jenny through the dark, quiet house to the tidy kitchen, deserted for the night, where she set out cups and biscuits on a tray while Jenny dealt efficiently with the range and a saucepan and milk and cocoa.
    “It’s a funny thing,” said Jenny, stirring briskly at the stove, “but cocoa always does more to restore one’s morale than any amount of brandy ever could. I suppose it’s the business of making it, and coping with a fire and raising a cheerful noise with the china and so forth. There was a time when I simply lived on cocoa, because the motions I went through to make it seemed to keep me from having to scream. I got quite bilious from it finally, but I never gave up and screamed.”
    “Did it last long—your bad time?” Camilla asked, her head bent above the tray.
    “Long enough,” Jenny answered frankly from the stove. “But finally I grew some sort of a scar tissue, apparently, because I’m all right now, I really am. I daresay Virginia’s told you about the man I was engaged to falling in love with somebody else,” she continued steadily. “You don’t have to be tactful about it, goodness knows it was no secret at the time! There was no point in my trying to hang on to him, of course, if that was the way he felt. But all the same, it wasn’t the sort of thing you expect to have happen to you, was it!” the slow, beautifully formed words went on. “It’s your pride that gets broken, I think, as much as your heart. You begin to wonder what’s wrong with you. If your man is killed, that’s clean and definite and can happen to anybody—you can still hold your head up. But if he just decides in cold blood that he prefers somebody else after all, you feel sort of—black and blue for a while, and you want to crawl away and hide. Not that I would rather Gerald had got killed, I don’t mean it to sound that way—” She took the saucepan off the stove and poured the cocoa carefully into the tall china pot on the tray and carried the saucepan to the sink. “You know, this is very funny, I’ve never been able to talk about it before to anyone, noteven Virginia—I suppose it’s because you’re in trouble too—and if my own experience can keep you from going to pieces—”
    “H-how did you know I—” Camilla began and caught her breath.
    Jenny turned at the sink, with the tap running, and gave her a long, surprised look.
    “I meant your brother’s wound,” she said, and turned off the tap and came to Camilla at the table. “Is there something else?”
    “No—nothing—I—”
    Jenny laid a hand on Camilla’s arm.
    “Darling, have I put my foot in it somehow? I never meant to say anything—”
    “Jenny, do you think Sosthène is—was ever in love with Cousin Sally?”
    There was a long silence in the kitchen. Jenny took her hand off Camilla’s arm and