The bride wore black Read Online Free PDF Page B

isn't looking at me."
    "She was until I called your attention to it."
    "Who is she, anyway?"
    She shrugged. "I thought all along she came with Fred Sterling and his bunch. You know how he always shows up anywhere with a whole posse. But he left quite some

    time ago and now I see she's still here. Maybe she decided to stay on alone. Whoever she is, I like the way she handles herself. None of this cheap dazzle stuff. I've been watching, she's had her troubles all evening long, poor thing. Every time she tries to sneak out on the terrace alone, three or four of the men mistake it for a come-on and make a beeline after her. Then a minute later she'll come in again, usually by the side door, still alone. What she does to get rid of them that fast I don't know, but she must have it down to a science. They they'll come slinking in again themselves right afterward, one by one, with that foolish look men have when they've been stymied. It's a regular sideshow."
    She touched her hand lightly to his lapel as a signal; they stopped on the half turn.
    "Some more people are leaving; I'll have to see them off. Be right back, darling. Miss me while I'm gone."
    He watched her go, standing there like a flagpole on which the flag has suddenly been run down. When the light blue gown had whisked from sight at one end of the room, he turned and went out the other way, onto the terrace for a breath of air. He felt a little sticky under the collar; dancing always made him warm, anyway.
    The lights of the city streaked off below him like the luminous spokes of a warped wheel. An indistinctly outlined, pearly moon seemed to drip down the sky like a clot of incandescent tapioca thrown up against the night by a cosmic comic. He lit the after-the-dance, whiie-waiting-for-her-to-come-back cigarette. He felt good, looking down at the town that had nearly had him licked once. "I'm all set now," he thought. "I'm young. I've got love, I've got a clear track. The rest is a cinch."
    The terrace ran along the entire front of the apartment. At one end it made a turn around to the side of the penthouse superstructure, and the moon couldn't follow it. It was dark there. There were no floor-length win-

    dows, either, just an infrequently used side door whose solid composition blacked out light.
    He drifted around the turn, because there was another
    couple on the other way and he didn't want to crowd
    them. He stood in the exact right angle formed by the
    two directions of the ledge, and now he had two views
    instead of one.
    And then suddenly she must have slipped unnoticed out through the side door and come along from that direction toward him that ubiquitous girl in black was standing there a foot or two away from him, looking out into the distance, the same way he was. She was weirdly like a white marble bust floating in the air without any pedestal, for the black of her dress was swallowed up in the blackness of the trough they both stood in.
    "Swell, isn't it?" he suggested. After all, they were at the same party together.
    She didn't seem to want to talk about that, so maybe it wasn't so swell to her.
    At that instant Corey came along, conquest bound. He'd evidently had his eye on her for some time past, but the wheel of opportunity had only now spun his way. Bliss's presence didn't deter him in the least. "You go inside," he ordered arbitrarily. "Don't be a hog, you're engaged."
    The girl said in quick interruption, "Do you want to be a dear?"
    "Sure I want to be a dear."
    "Then get me a big tinkly highball."
    He thumbed Bliss. "He does that better than I do."
    "It would taste better coming from you." It was primitive, but it worked.
    Corey came back with it. She accepted it from him, held it out above the coping, slowly tilted it until the glass was bottom up and empty. Then she gravely handed it back. "Now go in and get me another."

    Corey got the point. It would have been hard to miss it. The suave man-about-town glaze shattered momentarily and one of