Free Island in the Dawn by Averil Ives

“if you really feel like going home, as you suggested, there is really nothing to stop you, for with Uncle James and Aunt Millicent both here I shall be very adequately chaperoned,” turning to her host with an arch smile.
    He actually seemed to look a little astounded.
    “Did Miss Harding suggest returning home?”
    Cassandra rose with a graceful movement, and spread her hands and shoulders a little.
    “Poor Felicity didn’t really wish this to be known,” she said, without looking at the girl she employed, “but she suffers from bad headaches — a sort of migraine — and unfortunately these latitudes don’t improve it!” She lifted her eyes and gazed hard at Felicity, as if challenging her to deny what she had just offered to the others as a piece of information. Felicity was fascinated by the queer glint in the hard green-blue eyes. She knew that just then she hadn’t the power to deny anything that Cassandra said, as the latter went on smoothly: “I know I ought not to have allowed you to go on a tour of the island today, my dear, but you were so keen to go with Harry, and I didn’t want to be a spoil-sport. But now that I look at you I feel quite conscience-stricken, for you’re obviously all in. Is the headache absolutely devastating?” moving sympathetically nearer.
    Felicity felt as if she was suffering from a constriction in the throat. Her headache was bad — very bad! — but she could have got through the evening somehow without betraying the fact, and it was the first bad headache she had had for weeks, due entirely to exposure to too much sun. But Cassandra was t r ying to make her out a kind of invalid.
    “I — ” she choked, and found that words simply would not come.
    Cassandra shook her red head at her.
    “Go back up to your room, my dear, and slip into bed. We’ll all excuse you, and Mr. Halloran will forgive you making the rest of us late for dinner!” Her eyes were still cold, but her mouth smiled. “I dare say Florence will bring you something.” She turned sweetly to her host. “You won’t mind issuing instructions to Florence to take something light upstairs to Felicity, will you, Mr. Halloran?”
    “Of course not.” But he was looking curiously at Felicity, and there was also a good deal of concern in his eyes. “I had no idea this part of the world wasn’t suiting Miss Harding. She has looked very fit until tonight.”
    “Camouflage, my dear man,” Cassandra assured him. “Felicity has always been very good at putting up a fa c ade,” gently ruffing Felicity’s curls, “but I know what she suffers! And I’m not so selfish that I’m going to insist on keeping her here if it doesn’t suit her!”
    Still with the bewildered conviction that she was being hyp n otized by a snake — or something very like it — Felicity rose, a little awkwardly, and apologized to her host. Somehow the words formed in her brain and left her lips.
    “You will forgive, won’t you? I’m so sorry to be a nuisance ...”
    “Of course.” His hand rested lightly on her slim, bare arm, and his voice was gentle — the gentlest voice, she thought, she had ever heard in her life. “And you’re not a nuisance! You’re nothing of the kind ... So please don’t apologize!”
    She looked into his eyes and the vivid blue depths, so completely unlik e the blue of her employer’s eyes, seemed to reach out and wash over her so that she awoke from her strange torpor, and all in a moment words bubbled in her throat, and she very nearly gave them utterance. She would have spoken, she would have said, regardless of the other two standing by: ‘But I don’t suffer from headaches, and it’s all an invention on the part of Cassandra because she wants to get rid of me,’ but Cassandra pushed her gently fr o m behind, and said: “Come on, my dear! I’ll come up with you and hand you over to Florence ... And if you’d prefer it I’ll help you into bed myself! You really are all in, and I