SOME BUILDERS
[CHAPTER I]
SIDNEY
"OH, God, teach me to forget! Teach me to forget!"
The cry was passionate and tense, as the girl clenched the newspaper in her slender hands.
The man overheard the cry by pure accident. He was lying lazily in a punt moored at the bottom of his hostess's garden, and the girl was leaning over a broad low wall, screened from view by a thick bush of syringa. She had come down to the river to be alone with her grief. He lay motionless, afraid to betray his presence; but she voiced the dreary bitterness in his own heart. He had come down from town to try to forget too. He had only arrived about an hour or two before, and was told that his cousin, Lady Fielding, had gone out for the afternoon. As he lay in his boat and heard the crackle of the newspaper in the girl's hand, he wondered dully why she, as well as he, had received a blow through the Press on the same day.
He saw the announcement in his mind's eye which had staggered him that morning, when he opened the "Times" at his club.
"HUGHES—KEITH. On July 29, in Bombay, by the Rev. Owen Keith, M.A., cousin of the bride, Archibald Thomas Hughes, only son of the late General Thomas Hughes, to Eva Mary, youngest daughter of Colonel William Keith, C.B., of Omeraymore, N.B."