Love is for Ever Read Online Free

and she felt certain he was aware of it, and that in his manner there was a certain amount of condescension because she was so unimportant, and he had been faintly bored by even the thought of her arrival in response to his grandmother’s somewhat impulsive invitation.
    Otherwise, she was certain, he would have met her when she came off the clipper. He was too well brought up, and too conscious of the dignity of the Cortinas, to show discourtesy to a favored guest. Good manners were as much inbred in him as pride of family, but a young woman from England about whom he knew nothing—or practically nothing—and who had simply jumped at the opportunity to enjoy a free holiday, might very well not be looked upon by him as a favored guest.
    She was just a guest he was forced to entertain.
    C H A P T E R T H R E E
    Juanita was overwhelming in her attentiveness, and Jacqueline had never had so much done for her since she was a child. Her bath run for her, clothes unpacked, the dress she was to wear that evening pressed and returned to her before she needed to put it on.
    It was the black cocktail dress, because having no idea how much or how little the other people in the house dressed up for the latter part of the day, she had decided that it was the least likely to let her down when she was making her first appearance at a formal meal.
    Once she was dressed, with an extra touch of lipstick and even a smear of eye-shadow, but very little powder, she realized that she was looking her best. Juanita beamed approval, and extracted a scarlet flower from a vase on the dressing table and tucked it into the belt of the dress. Then she stood back and clapped her hands.
    The stiff black taffeta had a very full skirt, while the bodice hugged Jacqueline’s slight shape closely, and a tiny upstanding collar acted as a frame for her face. She wore her mother’s pearls, but they were her only adornment. The flower provided the necessary touch of color.
    Juanita, who had insisted on brushing her hair vigorously, and then polished the blue-black curls with a silk handkerchief until they shone, told her in Spanish, which Jacqueline understood:
    “The senorita is charming! Her appearance is delightful! Bueno!”
    And Jacqueline wondered whether, if she assisted Miss Howard with her dressing, she had paid her even more extravagant compliments, because they would certainly be merited.
    She wandered out on to the balcony outside her room, since Juanita gave her to understand that she had plenty of time, and watched the soft closing down of the night over the world of color and perfume without. One moment the color was glowing and palpitating like a flame, and then the shadows were creeping across the grass and the carefully tended flower beds, and the arch in the high white wall facing her was a mysterious patch of shadow beyond which lay deeper mysteries.
    Behind her the lights glowed softly in her bedroom, amber-shaded lights which made the room appear at its best. Jacqueline had experienced a little thrill of unalloyed pleasure when she had made her first acquaintance with it, for such a bedroom had never before been placed at her disposal in her life. It contained luxuries hitherto associated in her mind with people like film stars—people like Martine Howard, who was probably occupying an even more sumptuous apartment—and linked therefore with stage-sets.
    Such luxuries as quilted satin bed-heads, an ivory telephone beside the bed, a dressing-table that appeared to be wrought entirely of beaten silver, and had a lovely Florentine mirror on the wall above it. And adjoining the bedroom there was a bathroom that was a blaze of chromium and turquoise-blue tiles, with masses of monogrammed towels the color of early primroses on the towel rails.
    Jacqueline’s clothes had been stowed away in capacious wardrobes, and she knew that they were lost in the amount of space that was there at her disposal, just as she herself felt suddenly rather lost