Sunshine Yellow by Mary Whistler Page A

indignation and resentment. “She can rest for as long as she pleases in my room”—afterwards she wished she had had the sense to offer the guest-room—“and I’ll give you both a call when lunch is ready.”
    She raced up the stairs ahead of them to show them the way to her room, and as she flung open the door she didn’t notice her aunt glance curiously round it, as if satisfying a curiosity that was very much to the surface in spite of her daughter’s collapsed condition. Then, when she had turned on the electric fire for them, and invited them to make themselves as comfortable as possible, she raced downstairs again to Stephen, who was standing in front of the sitting-room window and staring sightlessly out to sea.
    Timidly she touched his arm.
    “Is that you, Penny?” he said tonelessly. “It never occurred to me before that I must present a rather ghastly spectacle to people who look at me.”
    “But you don’t!” she assured him, her indication rising afresh, and her young voice ringing with it. “You don’t look any different from the way you used to look, except that there are one or two scars above your eyes, and of course you can’t — ”
    “See?”
    He turned to her, and she saw that he was still without his dark glasses.
    “I suppose it does give you a rather strange feeling to meet the direct gaze of a blind man? And Veronica is an extremely sensitive type, and she must have been profoundly shocked. You’ve had an opportunity to get used to me, Penny, so you’re no longer shocked, but Veronica couldn’t take it.”
    “She is upset,” Penny said, looking at him with all her heart in her eyes, and yearning to do something about the bitterness round his mouth. “But she’ll get over it. You mustn’t forget that she hasn’t been very well lately.”
    “What’s been the matter with her?”
    “I don’t know ... she’s a bit run down, I think.” He turned back to the window.
    “Would you say she was genuinely upset just now?”
    “Oh, yes—quite genuinely.”
    “And she’s upstairs trying to get over—the shock I caused her when I took off my glasses! I suppose that was rather a brutal thing to do?”
    “Not at all. I’ve told you, you look perfectly all right.”
    “You’re a dear little soul, Penny,” he said, and she felt as if she had dropped right back into the limbo of unimportant things—certainly unimportant feminine companions—by comparison with her cousin Veronica.
    Ten minutes later Veronica came down the stairs, her face delicately powdered, her eyes no longer red with weeping, but just a little misty with feminine sympathy. She went straight up to Stephen and slipped a hand in his arm.
    “Forgive me, Stephen,” she said softly. “Not only for behaving so badly when I arrived just now, but—for everything!”
    Stephen remained silent for perhaps a full second, and then groped for the fingers resting on his arm and patted them lightly.
    “Of course. Not,” he added, surprisingly, “that there was ever anything to forgive!”
    Lunch passed off with surprising lightness and ease considering the tension that pervaded the atmosphere when Mrs. Wilmott and her daughter arrived at the cottage. They expressed themselves as charmed with both the situation and the simplicity of the latter, although Mrs. Wilmott did voice a certain doubt concerning the isolation of such a retreat for one who was as young as Penny.
    She added hastily that of course she understood Stephen was not in the mood for social contacts at the present time—but that as soon as he felt capable of making a return to normal life he must do so ... for his own sake, as well as the sake of Penny.
    “You mustn’t forget that you have friends,” she said, introducing a warmly affectionate note into her voice, “and those friends miss you.” It was possibly by accident that her glance alighted upon her own daughter. “You mustn’t forget, either, that you have Old Timbers, and if Penny is