A marrying man

BY G. B. STERN
London NISBET & CO. LTD. 22 BERNERS STREET, W.
First Published in 1918
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
PANTOMIME SEE-SAW TWOS AND THREES GRAND CHAIN
TO OLIVE WADSLEY
Kathleen Morrison, on her return to London, was not prepared for the empty, echoing house, the loud thud of her footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs, the ghostly appearance of the linen-shrouded furniture. Her brother and sister-in-law, with whom she made her home, usually abandoned the seaside towards the end of August; these were already the first days of September.
Not before Tuesday week, Miss Kathleen, the one resentful housemaid-in-charge answered her enquiries; the Missus said she'd written to you.
She had. Many times. But Kathleen, having once sent an assurance of her safety, together with a brief explanation of the circumstances of her escapade, very carefully refrained from opening the letters that came in reply. Not that family disapproval would for an instant have turned her from a decision to remain at least a month in Alpenruh; but the month itself was so strangely and perfectly apart from the sounding discordances of before and after, that she refused to mar its harmony by the possibility of a single jarring note. So the envelopes addressed in Edward's handwriting, and in Nelly's handwriting, accumulated in a neat little pile. Doubtless they contained home-truths. Kathleen promised herself a careful perusal of these on the ensuing New Year's Eve, when from previous experience she anticipated a fit of depression so intense that nothing could possibly serve to augment it. Meanwhile, she was glad to find that Edward and Nelly, and Nelly's father, old Mr. Jeyne, and Nelly's two children, Muriel and Nicolas, and Nelly's nurse, and Nelly's cook, were still absent from the house in North Kensington.
The house was high and narrow-breasted, situated in a neighbourhood which, whatever the generation, had been fashionable with the generation before, so that its inhabitants mainly consisted of ghosts and grumblers. The grumblers were of the kind who religiously take their five weeks' holiday in the summer, and are firmly imbued with the immorality of leaving their homes at any other period of the year. Therefore North Kensington was now a deserted wilderness of drawn blinds and white-smocked house-painters, of spectral scaffoldings and forlornly prowling cats. The milkman's was an eerie cry at dawn; and at eve the German band blared mournfully to unresponsive areas. Kathleen trod softly from one empty room to another; was given her meals at eccentric hours, in unfamiliar parts of the house; shivered a little as she locked her front door at nights—how stiff they were, those bolts! and with what startling clangour they shot at last into their sockets!—and was wonderfully at peace. With a present entirely negative, with a future carefully unglanced at, she was free amidst the prevailing spells of silence to yield herself entirely to a memory still so fresh and near that it asked to be re-lived, caressed and handled, laid to sleep for the pleasure of bidding it wake again. Idly she wondered why it was that she did not miss Gareth more poignantly; why she was content to believe their idyll wholly a gift of thirty-one days which haphazard had capriciously flung them, that hot oily afternoon, on the wharf at Folkestone....