"Rinehart, Mary Roberts - The Amazing Interlude" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rinehart Mary Roberts)

simple plans. Now and then he kissed the little hollow under her ear,
and because he knew nothing of the abandon of a woman in a great passion
he missed nothing in her attitude. Into her silence and passivity he
read the reflection of his own adoring love and thought it hers.

To be fair to Sara Lee, she imagined that her content in Harvey's
devotion was something mote, as much more as was necessary. For in Sara
Lee's experience marriage was a thing compounded of affection, habit,
small differences and a home. Of passion, that passion which later she
was to meet and suffer from, the terrible love that hurts and agonizes,
she had never even dreamed.

Great days were before Sara Lee. She sat by the fire and knitted, and
behind the back drop on the great stage of the world was preparing,
unsuspected, the mise en scene.



II


About the middle of January Mabel Andrews A wrote to Sara Lee from
France, where she was already installed in a hospital at Calais.

The evening before the letter came Harvey had brought round the
engagement ring. He had made a little money in war stocks, and into
the ring he had put every dollar of his profits - and a great love, and
gentleness, and hopes which he did not formulate even to himself.

It was a solitaire diamond, conventionally set, and larger, far larger,
than the modest little stone on which Harvey had been casting anxious
glances for months.

"Do you like it, honey?" he asked anxiously.

Sara Lee looked at it on her finger.

"It is lovely! It - it's terrible!" said poor Sara Lee, and cried on his
shoulder.

Harvey was not subtle. He had never even heard of Mabel Andrews, and
he had a tendency to restrict his war reading to the quarter column in
the morning paper entitled "Salient Points of the Day's War News."

What could he know, for instance, of wounded men who were hungry? Which
is what Mabel wrote about.

"You said you could cook," she had written. "Well, we need cooks, and
something to cook. Sometime they'll have it all fixed, no doubt, but
just now it's awful, Sara Lee. The British have money and food, plenty