Free Kerry by Grace Livingston Hill Page B

honeymoon in the morning!”
    “But you said we would find Kerry!” wailed Kerry’s mother with a deluge of tears.
    “Yes, but you held out information on us, old lady!” said Sam Morgan solemnly. “You never mentioned Kerry’s going to America. You didn’t say she had friends in the United States.”
    “But she hasn’t!” wept Isobel. “She hasn’t been there for years. Oh, my poor little Kerry! She won’t know what to do. Shannon never let her travel alone—!”
    “There you go again! Shannon! Shannon! Shannon Kavanaugh is DEAD!” roared her husband mightily. “If you mention him again I’ll go off and get a divorce! I’m sick to my soul of him and his notions. Besides his dear little, poor little Kerry is a dear little, poor little devil! She can take care of herself alrighty! Oh, yes, she’s clever alrighty! She’s clever! She’s a devil—!”
    And with this gallant reply Isobel had to be content and to go weeping to her bed.
    The next morning Sam Morgan was his genial self again, but very determined.
    “We’re going yachting!” he announced. “We aren’t wasting any time, see? How soon can you get your stuff together? Better just let the maid pack up this truck you’ve been buying. Telephone and have a trunk sent up, that’ll be the easiest way. Anything down at that other hotel you need to get or are you just going to chuck it all? We’d better close up that deal. No use hanging on any longer now we know Kerry’s gone for good.”
    Isobel gasped and suddenly realized that here was a matter in which she must depend upon herself. There was no kind good Shannon to take all the burden of packing and sorting. There was no Kerry to do her bidding while she lay resting and reading her endless novels and magazines.
    How sordid and dreadful the dull, shabby rooms looked when she entered alone and remembered the place where Shannon’s body had lain before they took him away to the undertaker’s. How with even this short absence the rooms seemed to be haunted and fearful. Shannon gone! Kerry gone! No one to depend upon. Sam already a broken reed, although she had not fully realized that as yet. The power of his money blinded her, the anticipation of her new position as his wife still held its glamour.
    She shuddered and drew back as the shut-up air of the deserted rooms struck her like a human hand and smote all her senses harshly.
    Quickly she forced herself to walk across the room and pull open the curtains, which had been drawn down that last evening she had stayed there. The bald sunshine slanted a thin shiver of light across the faded carpet and grim old furniture. The scuffed upholstery glared out in all its defects. How she hated it! If any shadow of doubt about the course she had taken with regard to her marriage had dared to hover around the door of her mind, it quickly scuttled away in the face of the sordidness of the old life.
    She went into her old bedroom resolved to work rapidly and get away. She would not look toward Kerry’s door, which stood wide and showed an empty room, from which the housemaid had already stripped the bed covers and taken down soiled curtains.
    Isobel attacked her clothes closet first. Those old cheap clothes that had been such a trial! How quickly she disposed of them, the rusty black satin, the old blue chiffon that had seen so many summers—and winters; the green velvet that would have made such a lovely little frock for Kerry, only she never had been quite willing to give it up herself, her one velvet! How shabby it looked now in the glare of the plain little lodging room! Her old dressing gown and the feather trimming that Shannon used to like her to wear because he said it reminded him of the ermine and velvet in which he would like to dress her if he could. Dear old Shannon! She wondered if he wasn’t glad that she was living in luxury now! He had always wanted her to have nice things, and while he hadn’t of course approved of Sam any more than her