Free Beauty for Ashes by Grace Livingston Hill Page A

pin and they had been watching her squirm. With supernatural insight, it came to her that it was not because those two women were cruel and that they had been glad of her trouble and had tried to rub it in, but because they had been jealous of her wealth and easy life, and it helped to assuage some of their pangs of envy to know that she too had seen disappointment. They had presumed to think of her as feeling above them, and now they were glad that she was brought low. She perceived that it was a state of mind with them rather than personal enmity.
    Yet though she could thus excuse and in a sense forgive them, her soul groveled in the earth to think that Stan, her fiancé whom she had trusted so perfectly, had laid her open to such pity as this. Doubtless this was the way everybody thought of her, in spite of their modern standards, as a girl whose fiancé had gone after another girl on the very eve of marriage.
    She went to her room when they reached the house, saying she must write some letters, but she did not write letters when she got there. She buried her face in her pillow and let the whole wretched horror sweep over her soul and rack it as it would. There was no one now to interrupt. The tears did not flow down her face, for still they would not come, but she knew they were flowing down in a torrent into her heart, tears of her life’s blood, and she wished—oh, how she wished—that she could cry out her life and be done with it all. Then, just in the middle of her extreme sorrow, the dinner bell rang for the hearty midday meal, and she wondered how she could ever go down and eat. Was there no place in this wide world where one could get away and grieve to death?
    Then she heard the dear old lady’s voice calling her, “Gloria, Gloria dear! Come down to dinner!” and the spirit of her own grandmother seemed to stir in the sweet lavender-scented room and urge her. “Go, dear! Don’t grieve my old friend.”
    Grandmother would never have slunk away and grieved to death. Grandmother would have gotten up and done her duty.
    Gloria arose, washed her face hastily, and hurried downstairs.
    There was johnnycake, hash, and applesauce for dinner. It was the first time Gloria had ever been on intimate terms with any of them, and she liked them all. Somehow the good cheer around the table dispelled her gloom. After she had helped with the dinner dishes, she hunted out a book from the bookcase, put on a heavy coat, for the spring air was chilly, and curled up in the hammock on the porch to read.
    It was a gorgeous day, and the very air seemed buoyant, yet her heart was so heavy the sunshine fairly hurt. But after a time, she grew interested in the book and managed to while away most of the afternoon.
    She tried taking a walk alone, but somehow, with her father away, the romance was gone, and when she looked down the aisle of the woods, she could only see a long vista of years, her life, with the zest all gone out of it.
    Her father called her up on the telephone that night to know if she was all right and to say he might have to stay a couple of days longer. Did she want the chauffeur to come up after her, or could she stand it a little longer without him?
    She answered cheerily that she was doing beautifully, and though her heart shrank from another day or two of monotony without him, she shrank still more from going home, so she told him she was quite all right and he mustn’t hurry away from important business just for her.
    But when she hung up, she had a dreary feeling of being a prisoner in a strange land.
    Yet home would have been worse. There would have been Mrs. Asher and her woes, there would have been Nance with her fierce morbidity, and there would have been all the bridesmaids running in to make painful duty calls and bemoan her fate with her. No, a thousand times no, she could not go back home yet. She must get her bearings before she went back, though just how she was to get them was beyond her. She