"LOVE’S LOTTERY”

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 161, 11 July 1938, Page 9

"LOVE’S LOTTERY”

(By Katharine Haviland-Taylor) Instalment 25.

Synopsis of Preceding Instalments: Homely little Ciciiy iscen, unhappy because of her mother’s four divorces, fairly worships Geoffrey Field with whom she dances only once at dancing school before her mother takes her to Europe when she is 11. She is 21 when her mother marries a fifth time and dies shortly afterwards, and she returns to .New York to live with her Aunt Ella Eden. She has become a beautiful girl. Geoff wins her yes within a month, although 1 * Uncle" Albion Marshall, best friend of her father, now dead, tells her she cannot be happy with Field whose only thought is of his Wall Street success. Geoff’s secretary is absent when Ciciiy sails for Paris to get her trousseau and he directs lliss Miggs to compose and send an ocean letter. The office force has fun burlesquing his love-letter writing and this message iS wirelessed by mistake. Breaking the engagement, Ciciiy goes to Florence where she meets Sir Terrill (Terry) BrownThrope, 45 and wealthy. She likes Terry and agrees to marry him. Terry suggests that she cable Geoff to join them so that she may decide whether her choice is wise. When Geoff allows a market upset to detain him, she sails for New York to marry ♦ Terry. Geoff is awaiting her, the old love is rekindled, but Terry refuses to release her after talking with Geoff and deciding he is not the right man for her. A girl named Blanche, with whom Geoff had had an affair while in college, threatens to tell his wife if he marries, aud Geoff then urges Ciciiy to elope with him at once. Ciciiy regarded Terry almost stupidly; his words about not being the man who now “ran things” for her, voiced a truth she had not realised. For a long minute this truth stunned her. “I may as well admit,” she said slowly, “that I trust-Terry as fully as I have ever trusted anyone. He has .been quite fair about this, Geoffrey, more fair than you have been.” 44 0 h! Indeed!” He laughed shortly, unpleasantly. “Bunning otf with you, marrying you in that way, would be cheating him,” she said. “I gave him my promise; he has not released me. He has no thought that I could break my word and nis trust in me makes me stronger. I am beginning to think that the best strength is made by trust.” “I am not interested in generalities, my dear; not—in—the least! I want to come down to—brass tacks!” He brought a hard-clenched fist down upon a taffle; he drew near her, to stand before her, legs apart, arms folded on chest, head bent, glaring down at her. “I want you . . . that’s all. A man who's a man doesn’t give one damn how he gets the woman he wants. You prattle of ‘honour’! Honour! That weak little word js for old maids of both sexes and—damned fools! If he loved you, he wouldn’t think of honour ... he'd do as I do; try to persuade you to have a little sense. LoQk here, what’s changed you? You’re—damnr.blv changed! ’ ’ “I have not changed,” she disagreed, “but I thins, Geoffrey, that for the first time you and I are meeting an issue that is made by our very different viewpoints—” Again “generalities,” he thought; they confused him and further irritated him; he wanted to “keep to the point.”

He pulled a chair close to her, dropped to it and took her hand between his. “Ciciiy, all is fair in love and war,” he said, “and we’re loving and warring. You forget that. You’re Quixotic —you always have been and 1 like it in you, but you carry it too far. There isn’t a day goes by in which I don’t have to make some compromise in business and with my code in order to keep on top—” She gave to him a full, measuring, level look from her deep blue eyes. “Geoffrey,” she said, “to win in that way is to lose —” Blanche stood at his elbow, put there by Ciciiy’s words; Blanche had said the same thing in her way, a way that had grown rough because the path upon which he had set her feet was rough. Lord, he wished the interlude with Blanche had been no more than a bad dream . . .

He drew a deep breath, sat erect, smiled at Ciciiy —just so did he meet those adversaries he would vanquish and usually did vanquish. “Now it's agreed,” he said surely, “that you and I, Ciciiy, are going to eut and run.”

Miss Ella, who was beginning to feel her age for the first time, was passing in the hall as he spoke. She heard Geoffrey’s words; they followed her as she made a dazed return to her room.

“My Ciciiy doing—that!” she thought, bhe sobbed suddenly.

She had known Terry as a rarely line and a rarely gentle one. Ciciiy, married to Geoffrey, would find another world. Geoffrey would afford a certain type of worldly woman great pride; Terry would assure her less worldly sister great happiness. Geoffrey, who a few months earlier had been 44 a dear boy,” was now, from contrast to Terry, a menace and a threat.

She must telephone Sir Terrill; perhaps, even now, he might, in some way be able to stop the elopement Geoffrey planned. “I’ll come over immediately,” he promised when she whimpered out her news. “But, if you can, with out awkwardness, will you have the young man out of the way! I do not, since this development and the lack of sportsmanship it reveals in him, wish to meet him. And there would be no use of my meeting him. We do not speak the same language.” Miss Ella sent Hedges for Ciciiy, who answered the summons quickly. She saw, from the doorway, the unsteadiness of her aunt’s lips and the pink

puffiness of her eyelids, and heart | ached. ji “You sent for me, Aunt Ella?” she ‘ questioned uncertainly. “Yes. Sir Terrill has telephoned, 1 ’ Ciciiy, saying he wishes to speak to 1 you for a few moments and alone and— ■ now—if you can arrange it.” (Miss ■ Ella faltered; she never lied to Ciciiy .1 and lying to Ciciiy was not easy.) “110 ; seemed very urgent—and I told him 1 thought—you could arrange it. : 44 Geoffrey has gone,” Ciciiy answer- i ed. She waited, wavering, at the door- 1 } way after she spoke. i« “Ciciiy,” Miss Ella began. She ' paused. ; “Yes?” Ciciiy prompted. 14 Bo—be as kind as you can to . Terry; he is much to be pitied.” 44 1 will be,” she promised. She turn- . ed away then and went to her own sit- ; ting room. If Terry had ever shown a ] bolder love for her, she realised, the i last week would have had more ques- ] tion in it. But ho had not; perhaps be- < cause he could not. 110 had promised J her but the peace she had thought— ; without Geoffrey—to be essential and that she had thought must take the place of ecstasy. “There isn’t a goes by in which j I don’t have to make some compromise ' in business and with my code in ordor : to keep on top.” She tried to still the echo of those | words and the echo would be not stilled. But certainly—she moistened her ■ lips—with time she could cnange Geoffrey. Yet just why did she think she • could change him? She never had. Why, too, had he been so feverishly eager for a quick marriage? She had told him she hated the idea. Her objection he had brushed aside too brutally; she saw it suddenly and rovealingly. Every objection of hers, to everything she wished, he would brush aside in quite that harsh, sure way, if he differed from her. Suddenly she knew it. She stood, weak and trembling, by the window. Was it possible that Terry and her aunt and her Uncle Albion were right? That their selfless love for her had shown to them a truth to which her love for Geoffrey had blinded her? Terry had said her love for Geoffrey 1 would not grow; he had said that there . was no soil in which to grow it. Terry, | gentle, sure, considerate. Stepping from the elevator into Miss J Ella’s hallway, Sir Terrill was met by Benson to whom he handed his stick, gloves and hat. “I won’t shed my coat,” he said, “I am stopping but a moment —” Benson bowed. Terry wandered into tho drawing room where he waited, standing. He heard a slight sound bo- 1 hind him, and turned. Ciciiy stood framed in the broad doorway, wearing an orange frock that made her hair look as if touched by the sunlight of a tropic noon. But he saw that her cheeks were pale and his heart accused him. . . . They had stretched her on the rack between them. 4 4 Well, child—f” he began. 44 How do you do, Terry?” lie saw she was shy, uncertain; ashamed probably of that which his attempt to do good for her had made her do. 44 Can’t you lay aside your coat?” she asked. 4 4 I'm stopping for only a moment —” he answered. “But I wish you’d take it off—you look so transient, wearing it—” 4 ‘As you like,” he replied, as he shrugged from his coat to <*-op it to a chair. 44 And you’ll sit down?” 44 May I be forgiven if I don’t? Men first learned to stand on their hind legs, I think, when they had something to say that made them feel important.” He was mocking himself in the old way, she saw, or pretending to. She thought, “pretending to”; he was so white, and the strain, which had been growing around his lips that week, was now deeply imprinted. She dropped to the small sofa before j the fire. Arm on a corner of the mantel, he stood looking down at her; the I loveliest, the blindest child whom he had ever known . . . whom he worshipped; about whom he was mad, utterly, beautifully, ravingly, mad . . . j He looked at a piece of Miug that Jhe did not sec . . . It—wasn’t going jto be—easy. He’d have to be pretty careful or—he’d add to tho shadows I that were ahead of her—add to those shadows by giving her some glimpse ■of what losing meant to him. I There was a silence. Ciciiy broke it ! when she raised her face to look at , I Terry and to say, “Aunt said you 'wanted to see me rather especially,! [ Terry!” 1 j “Yes, I do, quite. Fact is, Ciciiy, we ['needn’t regard tho Geneva rules any l ■ longer; our quarrelling’s over. 1 am » frightfully sorry I bothered you so! •}. . . I’m beginning to think ‘No fool • like an old fool,’ us, doubtless you j have.” J j She shook her head, vehemently; and l she found the little motion, of head .'made the room swim, blur. He must t' not —see how she felt. “Some day, I hope you may be able i' to think gently of me for my meddling. 1 know 1 have been—rather insufferr able,” he went on. “I never meant to 1 1 force you to marry me; I wanted only «■ to give you time—in which to be certain. I have done that. I still see this - marriage you are going to make as an ■ | unhappy one, because the man is less r | of a man than you should have, but you - will live the life you want to live and 1 sometimes, in doing that, pain is ■changed to joy.” 3 1 He paused a moment.

j “Ciciiy,” he continued, “years soften the light. I know that now j blacks and whites are less clear for me , than they were at twenty; and in a half light one sees more clearly than in the glare of noon . . . Thus, I expect that some day—your—” (he faltered) “your—children around you—you will think gently of me, which is all I want of you now—to—forgive me any pain I

have put in your life —’* “Is —my forgiving all you want, Terry?-' ’ “Quite, my dear — ,} He was proud of that and the way he had said it; he saw it as a gallant lie. (To be Continued.)