Sunshine Yellow Read Online Free PDF Page A

the time she had worded it, decided that that wouldn’t do and re-worded, and finally got it off, another telegram was on its way to her from England. And that made the one she had just sent seem like a stroke of irony, or a bitter jest.
    Stephen was so anxious to get the whole thing over and done with, once he had made that astonishing proposal to Penny, that without quite realizing what was happening to her she allowed herself to be rushed into a form of matrimony that could offer nothing for her future save security, and after giving a lot of thought to the word security she decided that she must have been mad to be tempted by it.
    Stephen had been almost brutally plain ... brutally blunt.
    “I shan’t ask anything of you, Penny, because that would be rather like insulting you. I’m not in love with you, and you’re not in love with me, but you’re alone in the world and I can do a lot for you. You’ll be a nice little wife to have around the house, to act hostess when I give a dinner party, and that sort of thing, and I hope we’re good enough friends not to drive each other mad every time we meet at the breakfast table.”
    He had said that the second time he took her out to dinner, and by that time she was already having secret qualms. In fact she was amazed at herself because she had ever let him talk her into agreeing to such an extraordinary and cold-blooded union when she was a young girl of twenty-four—quite pretty, because he frequently said so!—and he an apparently warm-blooded man of thirty-six.
    It was true there was more than ten years between their ages, but Veronica had been exactly a year older than herself, and Stephen had been madly in love with her.
    Penny didn’t expect him to pretend to fall in love with her—he was too bitterly unhappy, she well knew, over the collapse of that other engagement—but the thing that worried her was her own secret knowledge that she had been in love with him from the moment Veronica first brought him home to Grangewood, and, holding out his hand to her with an almost teasing smile in his blue eyes, he had called her Penny Wise because her eyes were so big and brown and slightly solemn, as if they were filled with wisdom.
    Right from the be ginning he had refused to look upon her as a young woman who was capable of acting the part of his future mother-in-law’s secretary— amongst other things ; and had dismissed her in his charming, careless fashion as if she were nothing more than a schoolgirl.
    But that didn’t prevent her losing her heart to him. In point of fact it had dropped right out at his feet from the moment that he called her by that now familiar name.
    Penny Wise ... Penny Foolish from the moment that she consented to marry him, for how could she hug to herself a secret that would always have to remain a secret and not give it away in unguarded moments? How could she be happy keeping up such a pretence, knowing that he had no real use for her at all, and had only asked her to marry him as a kind of futile gesture—to Fate? To the unkind Providence that had deprived him of the woman he did love—and keep up the pretence for years?
    “Don’t worry, Penny,” he had said reassuringly, after that second dinner. “I know you don’t properly realize what you’re doing, and that perhaps I’m depriving you of something ... But keep that untouched look, and it’ll be worth while! At least you’ll never suffer disillusion!”
    Wouldn’t she? she wondered. Was he right? Could you suffer disillusion if you expected nothing?
    She was amazed at the speed with which he went to work, arranging the details of their wedding. He wouldn’t permit her to write to her Aunt Heloise and inform her of what had happened, and as she was not a minor there was no necessity at all for anyone’s consent to be obtained. The cook at Grangewood made a wedding cake which was never cut or eaten ... to Penny’s knowledge, that was, for the reception was held at a