Daybreak Read Online Free PDF

said. “Rare diseases, I think. Or tropical, maybe? I’m not sure.”
    “He’s going on to a fellowship after a three-year residency, Mrs. Alcott told me.”
    “He won’t be coming back here to settle, mark my words. It’ll be New York or Boston, more likely.”
    “Well, probably. He won’t be home at all this summer. No time off, Mrs. Alcott says.”
    “The Baker girl will be disappointed, that’s for sure. He’s been seeing her for the last three years whenever he’s been home.”
    “They make a good-looking pair. She’s a stunning girl, don’t you think so?”
    “But he’s not ready to be serious, his father says. He won’t even consider marriage until he’s finished his training.”
    “She won’t wait for him. She’s twenty-six, and thirty is looming up.”
    “That remains to be seen. You never know.”
    She had better not wait for him, thought Laura, and scoffed:
a stunning girl
. The Baker girl with that foolish constant smile that made your cheeks ache to look at? Why ever would Francis want her?
    From a group snapshot that had been taken one Fourth of July, she cut out his head and put it into her gold locket where before her aunts had been. Then she had to wear the locket day and night so that they wouldn’t find it in her room. It was not that they would be angry or hurt; no, of course not; they would be merely amused, and she could not have borne that either.
    They thought she had a crush on Francis. “And why not?” Aunt Lillian said to the cook. Her voice, unlike Cecile’s, was loud enough to carry up the backstairs from the kitchen. “With his looks—those eyes of his—he can turn any woman’s head if he wants to.”
    “And even if he doesn’t want to.” The cook laughed. “Any woman from eight to eighty.”
    They were cheapening her love. A crush, they called it, a feeling you might have for one boy in March, for another in April, and still another in May. And opening the locket in front of the mirror, Laura studied Francis’s face, which seemed to be looking back at her with love. But then, I am only twelve, she thought. If only she were older …
    Unexpectedly, one weekend he flew home from Boston. When she saw him coming across the lawn from his house, she dashed out, banging the screen door behind her, and threw her arms around his neck. She had always done so, and when she was still small enough, he had always lifted and hugged her. She was hardly small enough now; so taking her arms down from his neck, he held both of her hands and kissed her forehead.
    “Oh, it’s good to be back! How are you, Princess?”
    “You’re too big now to hug Francis like that,” Aunt Lillian reproved her that night. “Laura darling, you’re not a child anymore.”
    Hot with humiliation and knowing what was meant, she did not answer. What was meant was:
You have breasts
. He felt them when you pressed against him.
    “She may be tall for her age, but she is still a child after all,” Cecile said.
    Would they never learn that she always overheard them when they were having their coffee in the sitting room?
    “I sometimes think you read too much into things, Lillian.”
    “And I sometimes think you don’t read at all.”
    That was Lillian. Cecile was the sweeter, the romanticone. But Lillian was the smarter of the two. And so Laura learned care and caution.
    Then suddenly she was fifteen. Long ages seemed to have passed, not just three years, since she had been an impetuous girl of twelve. She had a quiet manner. The promise of height had been kept; she was slender, and her striking hair was still blond. Thanks to the aunts who, knowing how to dress, had taught her well, she had fine, subtle taste. Her clothes were simple. She wore a necklace of gold links, a small ruby ring that had belonged to her mother, and a man’s wristwatch that the army had sent home from Korea. And hidden under her collar, she wore also Francis’s picture in the locket, although it was two years since she