Sunshine Yellow Read Online Free Page A

(particularly, Mrs. Wilmott was not too happy to observe, the company! Which meant the young men who danced with her every night, and lounged with her on the beach, including the young American who might, or might not, have a wealthy father back home in the United States).
    Mrs. Wilmott was so afraid that her daughter—experiencing a natural reaction after escaping the danger of marrying a man she had discovered a little late she did not love—might become involved even more disastrously while she was still revelling in her freedom. And by disastrously Mrs. Wilmott meant where there was little or no security for such a delicately reared girl.
    Veronica saw her mother looking dazed on the terrace, and she picked up her wrap and beach bag and told the young American that she thought they ought to be returning to the hotel for something rather more stimulating than a bottle of coca-cola, with a straw stuck in the bottle, before lunch.
    “Just as you say, honey,” the American agreed, and they approached the foot of the terrace steps with him carrying all her impedimenta, including the bottle of sun-tan oil.
    Mrs. Wilmott held out the telegram.
    “Read it,” she said faintly. “I’ve a feeling that the sun’s too hot, and perhaps I’ve had a little too much of it.”
    Veronica took the telegram and read it while her escort vanished discreetly on the pretext of running to earth a waiter. Mrs. Wilmott waited for her daughter’s reaction to such an astonishing piece of news.
    “Well?” she said, as Veronica stood with her lovely dark head bent, her scarlet sun-suit a gay blob of color on the terrace. She took off her dark glasses and re-read the telegram without them.
    “Well, well!” she echoed her mother. “Well, well!”
    “Darling, don’t be irritating,” Mrs. Wilmott begged. “This is an extraordinary piece of news, and you must feel very strongly about it. I’ll confess, I wouldn’t have believed it of Stephen ... and, quite truthfully, I don’t believe it now! It’s a hoax. Some mischievous person’s idea of a joke.”
    “I shouldn’t think so,” Veronica returned, dropping into a comfortable chaise-longue and clasping her hands behind her head. She stared without emotion up into the blue, blue depths of the sky. “It’s happened before, you know ... marriage on the rebound after a bitter disappointment. And as Penny’s the very last person Stephen would contemplate marrying if he wasn’t half out of his head with misery, she’s the most likely one he would turn to in his present state of mind. Poor Stephen!” she added with belated sympathy, and stuck a cigarette in the end of a long ivory holder and lighted it with a gold lighter ... which, incidentally, Stephen had once given her.
    Her mother clicked her tongue in impatience.
    “And you’re not even upset?” she demanded, with amazement. “You don’t mind that a man who professed to adore you could be so disloyal—forget you so soon!—and marry the girl who was entrusted with the task of returning all your wedding presents before the first of the acknowledgements could even begin to come in? You take my breath away! I find it quite impossible to understand you, Veronica!”
    Veronica turned her head towards her a little wearily. “Don’t try and work yourself up into a state of furious indignation, darling,” she begged. “You know very well that I was never the least bit in love with Stephen—well, perhaps a little, at one time!—and that it was almost entirely your own idea that I should marry him because he’s comfortably off, and you liked the idea of his being an important London surgeon. You were never very much concerned about whether or not I even liked Stephen ... so don’t go to the opposite extreme now and try and wish on me a broken heart!”
    “Well—really!” Mrs. Wilmott spluttered.
    Veronica directed at her a level look, tinctured very, very slightly with dislike and disapproval and a strong hint of