Lovely Shadow (Timeless Classics Collection) by Ursula Bloom

Author:Ursula Bloom [Bloom, Ursula]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: 1940s fiction, Edwardian fiction, classic women's fiction, classic literary fiction, literary fiction, women's literary fiction, women's fiction
Publisher: Wyndham Books
Published: 2020-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

Four

Gradually Hugo got over the affair of Wynne Morgan, but the scar stayed for years. Youth takes its emotions very seriously, he had flung himself whole-heartedly into what he had believed to be his big romance. At first he could not believe that she had openly laughed at him; she was doing it to shield somebody else, he thought. He made the usual romantic excuses for her, he believed that he had been to blame in some way, but not Wynne. Never Wynne.

Unfortunately she talked; she was one of those gas-bag women who collect men as entomologists collect butterflies, sucking the life out of them, and spiking them through with a pin and exhibiting them in a collection, bragging about them. James Blair got to hear of it.

‘So, you young fool, you wore your heart on your sleeve and the daws pecked at it,’ he said. ‘I told you to let women alone. That sort of damned nonsense doesn’t work.’

‘Don’t let’s talk of it, please, father.’

‘Squeamish? Not much good now. She traded on your greenness, and you thought you were clever, didn’t you? How she must have laughed!’

He gashed open the scar and rubbed salt into it, satisfying some sadistic appetite within himself. He would not let Hugo forget.

The summer came, and the holiday, and Hugo went down to Hindhead again, on his cycle. James Blair did not care where the boy went, as long as he cost little, and left the place quiet. ‘Go where you please,’ he said, ‘but remember that at the moment I’m paying, and I won’t have my good money wasted.’

Hugo took his time cycling south, and he was lucky in that the weather was good, and England was at its loveliest. This time he benefited by his last experience and gave London a wide berth, coming into Berkshire through the green Thames valley, and crossing into Surrey. He slept one night in Berkshire, with the Thames only just across the road, at a little fishing inn, whose public bar was hoary with tall stories. He sat in a corner listening to the older men talking well into the night, and rode on next day to break his tour in the neighbourhood of Guildford, but being careful to avoid the town.

As he neared Hindhead with the noon of the third day, he knew that he was becoming very excited at the thought of meeting Muriel again. The Wynne Morgan affair still had the power to hurt him, but now perhaps more because he knew that he had been a fool, than because he had been in love.

He cycled towards the farm, and saw it as before, with the trees in front of it, and the field of wheat alongside. It was tantalising. He went up the broken lane, with the strong sweet scent of the elderberries in their creamy blossom, and he saw the house itself. The door was open and the morning glory wreathed it; the yard beside the low wall was much the

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