A Honeymoon in Space Read Online Free PDF

did, indeed, expect from your uncle’s niece when I undertook to take you to Europe. I must say—”
    â€œIf I were you, Mrs. Van, I don’t think I’d say much more about that, because, you see, it’s fixed and done. Of course, Lord Redgrave’s only an earl, and the other is a marquis, but, you see, he’s a man, and I don’t quite think the other one is—and that’s about all there is to it.”
    Their host had just left the deck-saloon, taking the early coffee apparatus with him, and Miss Zaidie, in the first flush of her pride and re-found happiness, was taking a promenade of about twelve strides each way, while Mrs. Van Stuyler, after partially relieving her feelings as above, had seated herself stiffly in her wicker-chair, and was following her with eyes which were critical and, if they had been twenty years younger, might also have been envious.
    â€œWell, at least I suppose I must congratulate you on your ability to accommodate yourself to most extraordinary circumstances. I must say that as far as that goes I quite envy you. I feel as though I ought to choke or take poison, or something of that sort.”
    â€œSakes, Mrs. Van, please don’t talk like that!” said Zaidie, stopping in her walk just in front of her chaperon’s chair. “Can’t you see that there’s nothing extraordinary about the circumstances except this wonderful ship? I have told you how Pop and I met Lord Redgrave in our tour through the Canadian Rockies two or three years ago. No, it’s two years and nine months next June; and how he took an interest in Pop’s theories and ideas about this same ship that we are on now—”
    â€œOh yes,” said Mrs. Van Stuyler rather acidly, “and not only in the abstract ideas, but apparently in a certain concrete reality.”
    â€œMrs. Van,” laughed Zaidie, with a cunning twist on her heel, “I know you don’t mean to be rude, but—well, now did any one ever call you a concrete reality? Of course it’s correct just as a scientific definition, perhaps—still, anyhow, I guess it’s not much good going on about that. The facts are just this way. I consented to marry that Byfleet marquis just out of sheer spite and blank ignorance. Lord Redgrave never actually asked me to marry him when we were in the Rockies, but he did say when he went back to England that as soon as he had realised my father’s ideal he would come over and try and realise one of his own. He was looking at me when he said it, and he looked a good deal more than he said. Then he went away, and poor Pop died. Of course I couldn’t write and tell him, and I suppose he was too proud to write before he’d done what he undertook to do, and I, like most girl-fools in the same place would have done, thought that he’d given the whole thing up and just looked upon the trip as a sort of interlude in globe-trotting, and thought no more about Pop’s ideas and inventions than he did about his daughter.”
    â€œVery natural, of course,” said Mrs. Van Stuyler, somewhat mollified by the subdued passion which Zaidie had managed to put into her commonplace words; “and so as you thought he had forgotten you and was finding a wife in his own country, and a possible husband came over from that same country with a coronet—”
    â€œThat’ll do, Mrs. Van, thank you,” interrupted Miss Zaidie, bringing her daintily-shod foot down on the deck this time with an unmistakable stamp. “We’ll consider that incident closed if you please. It was a miserable, mean, sordid business altogether; I am utterly, hopelessly ashamed of it and myself too. Just to think that I could ever—”
    Mrs. Van Stuyler cut short her indignant flow of words by a sudden uplifting of her eyelids and a swift turn of her head towards the companion way. Zaidie stamped again, this time more softly, and walked