Free Bride in Flight by Essie Summers Page A

hunted everywhere when I was packing.”
    She tugged them out and a shower of confetti fell on to the bed.
    Patsy and Nicola, she supposed dumbly.
    She had a moment of nausea. She was going to be exposed as an imposter, as the heartless bride instead of the brave young widow. She braced herself. Simon’s voice, when it came, sounded a long way off.
    He was appalled, embarrassed, gruff with emotion. “Oh, damn, what a thing to happen! Kirsty—” he caught her against him in wordless, masculine sympathy, much as he might have Rebecca.
    She stayed there, numbed, flummoxed.
    Then he said gently, “How devilish life can be at times, how unnecessarily cruel. I hadn’t realized how brief your happiness had been. Recent enough for that ! No wonder you can’t talk about it yet.”
    Relief flooded through her. Sooner or later, though, he might add two and two. And the more sympathy now, the more foolish he would feel, the more despising.
    She managed to say, “Simon, it doesn’t matter. I’ve got to learn to live with this situation. I’ll take the coat outside and shake it over the incinerator. I don’t want the children asking questions.”
    As she finished shaking it he came out with a small shovel with the confetti he had brushed up. She watched him set light to it.
    Simon MacNeill did some phoning, came back to her. “We’re in luck. A Ministry of Works truck is going through practically empty tomorrow morning. He’ll come and load up the children’s beds and tallboys for us, and a bed for you. I’ll get a stretcher out of the single quarters up there. We’ll take a few luxuries, a couple of easy chairs, some cushions and so on. Perhaps you could pack a box of Nan’s books to give you something to read during the evenings.
    “We’ll go up a little later in the day. I’ll book us in for tomorrow night at Lake Hawea Hotel. We’d better take Mark’s cot with us in the station wagon, he’ll sleep better in that.”
    They worked hard, tidying up the house ready for it to be left empty a few weeks, Simon mowed the lawns, clipped the edges, arranged with a schoolboy to look after them from now on. Kirsty packed suitcases, sorted out linen and plain china, hoping her numbness of spirit didn’t mean she would forget essentials.
    He said, “I wish we had more time here. I’d like to have run you round Dunedin, but I’ll do it when Nan is better and I bring you and the children back here. Nan thought if the children started school the first day, they’d not feel quite so strange as there are bound to be plenty of other new scholars then.”
    “Poor pets! It is an ordeal. But I suppose they’ll get home for lunch, it’s such a small place, the camp, I daresay the school is near?”
    “I’m afraid they’ll be away all day. The school bus will call for them about .eight and bring them back at four. The school is even further from Kairuri-mata than Haast, ten miles south. It’s at Hannah’s Clearing. The one at Haast was burnt down. But you’ll have Mark all day—a mixed blessing—and the women are very friendly, you won’t be too lonely.”
    When Kirsty was bathing Rebecca that night she said to her casually, “What fun it will be tomorrow night sleeping by the lake.”
    Rebecca looked up and away and said in a muffled tone, “I’ve never slept in a hotel before. Mark’s taking his cot. I wish I could take my own bed.”
    Kirsty, soaping the small brown back vigorously, said, “Well, it won’t matter, I’ll have your rubber and your sheets with us, and we can just bundle them up next morning—your’s and Mark’s—and nobody will know. That’s what I always did when I took the orphans to the seaside for their holidays.”
    She noticed the tension go out of the little back. “It’s going to be fun, Becky. I’ll have to rely on you to keep me right on things—after all, you’re the only woman of the house. You’ll have to tell me what Mark likes, what he means. I can’t get some of his