An Unmarked Grave Read Online Free PDF

wishes. We had always been of the same mind about important things. I could understand their feelings. I doubted that they could understand mine. Or was I being selfish and willful, where wiser heads knew better? I told myself that it was the wounded and dying who should be weighed in the balance, not my own wishes.
    In the end I put the letter—or what was to be the letter but was now only a blank sheet—in the desk drawer and went down to take my tea in the enclosed veranda. Some hours later I dined alone. I couldn’t have said afterward what I had chosen from the menu or how it had tasted.
    There was a woman at the next table. She sat there, staring into space as if her mind were a thousand miles away, picking at her food as if it had no more flavor than mine had had. Fair and rather pretty in an elegant way, she appeared to be older than I was, and I put her age at thirty.
    I hadn’t noticed her here before this, whether because she had sat somewhere else or because she’d just arrived.
    The headwaiter came over as she pushed her plate aside and asked, “Is everything to your liking, Mrs. Campbell?”
    “Yes, it was lovely, I’ve no appetite, I’m afraid.”
    “Not bad news, I hope,” he ventured, frowning. “You weren’t yourself last evening either.”
    Bad news was more common than good these days. Yet he’d asked as if he knew her from another visit and felt free to inquire.
    She laughed, but not convincingly. “No, nothing to worry about. Perhaps the sea air will improve my spirits and my appetite.”
    He cajoled her into trying the pudding, although it was clear to me that she wasn’t hungry enough to care. And she ate a little of it stoically, then signaled the waiter again, rose, and left the dining room.
    The Grand Hotel had an excellent reputation. It catered to people like my parents, and they had had no qualms about leaving me here to dine alone. I was well looked after, and so it wasn’t surprising to see another woman alone.
    I walked through great doors leading out to the veranda and stopped by one of the vases of fern for a few minutes to watch the waves roll in. I could sympathize in a way with Mrs. Campbell. I too needed to make a decision.
    I was just on the point of turning to go up to my room when I overheard someone mention her name. There were two women sitting together just by the balustrade. They couldn’t see me for that fern, but I could just glimpse Mrs. Campbell, a shawl over her shoulders, walking down to the drive and moving on to one of the benches set out beneath specimen trees. It was the one where Simon and I’d sat that morning.
    “There she is,” one of the women said in a low voice. “I told you I thought it was she.”
    “Yes, you’re right. Shocking that she should show her face in such a place as this. Not after all the publicity surrounding the petition for divorce.”
    “Unfaithful, he said.”
    “Yes. But it couldn’t be proved, could it?”
    “Sordid, all of it. I mean to say, he’s at war. You’d think she could put aside her personal feelings and remember that.”
    I turned and went indoors. I remembered too vividly Lieutenant Banner at Forward Aid Station No. 3, dying of his wounds and saying in a whisper that held a world of despair because time had run out, “She won’t have to go through the divorce now, will she? She’ll be a widow instead. I’ve made it easy for him, whoever he is. He’ll step into my shoes without a qualm. But if he mistreats her, by God, I’ll come back and haunt him!”
    I shivered as I remembered his vehemence, but it had cost him his last breath, and he was gone. I wondered sometimes if Mrs. Banner’s new husband had ever looked over his shoulder and listened for a footstep.
    The thought followed me into sleep.
    The next morning I took my pride and my courage in my hands and wrote the letter to London.
    I put the direction on the envelope, took it to the front desk for stamps, and when they offered to put it in