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Updated: May 24, 2025
As long as she made Karen happy and let him alone, he seemed to himself to tell her, he would get on very well; and he suspected that her clutch of Karen would soon loosen when she found it unchallenged. In the meantime there was not much satisfaction for him elsewhere. Karen's altered course left him often lonely.
Gregory rose from his letters and his eyes went from her face to Karen's, both showing their traces of tears. "It is au revoir, then," said Madame von Marwitz, standing before him, her arm round Karen's shoulders. "I am happy in my child's happiness, Mr. Jardine. You have made her happy, and I thank you. You will lend her to me, sometimes? You will be generous with me and let me see her?"
What happiness could she see for Karen's future if she were to have cut herself apart from her life; dropped you, and Karen with you? That, doubtless, would have been the easy thing to do. There is indeed no reason why women like Mercedes Okraska, women with the world at their feet, should trouble to think of the young men they may chance to meet, whose exacting moral sense they don't satisfy.
And the old lady gave the old soldier an alms, and went into the church with Karen. And all the people in the church looked at Karen's red shoes, and all the pictures, and as Karen knelt before the altar, and raised the cup to her lips, she only thought of the red shoes, and they seemed to swim in it; and she forgot to sing her psalm, and she forgot to pray, "Our father in Heaven!"
For some weeks this still and perfect happiness continued. The days were dark and stormy, and the nights long; but in Liot's home there was the sunlight of a woman's face and the music of a baby's voice. The early spring brought the first anxiety, for it brought with it no renewal of Karen's health and strength.
Looking back she sees Louis has lit a lamp and is seeking for her. She flies to the cove; if she can but find his boat and row away in it and get help! It is not there; there is no boat in which she can get away. She hears Karen's wild screams, he is killing her! Oh, where can she go? Is there any place on that little island where he will not find her?
And it was with the utmost gentleness and precaution, with, indeed, the air of one who draws softly aside from a sleeping viper found upon the path, that she answered: "I trust, indeed, that it may never be my Karen's pleasure, or yours, Mr. Jardine, to destroy what is precious; that would hurt me very much. And now, child, may I not see the rest of this beloved domain?"
Wherever Liot and Karen had learned each other, the lesson had been perfected. At their third meeting he asked her to be his wife, and she answered with simple honesty, "That is my desire." This betrothal was, however, far from satisfactory to Karen's aunt; she could bring up nothing against Liot, but she was ill pleased with Karen.
I spoke to her with lightest, most tender understanding, so that she should know that my heart was with her while never dreaming of the chasms that I saw in her happiness. It was he who forced me to an open declaration and he who forced me to leave; for how was happiness possible for Karen if I remained with them? No. He hated me, and was devoured by jealousy of Karen's love for me."
As he munched the drying sandwiches and sipped charged water the various liquors for cocktails on the sideboard offered a temptation which he sternly resisted Dundee's thought boiled and churned, throwing up picture after picture of Nita Selim, alive and then dead; of Penny Crain bless her! helping him at the expense of her loyalty to life-long friends; of Flora Miles, lying desperately and then confessing to a shameful theft; of Karen Marshall gallantly playing out the "death hand"; of Karen's stricken, childish face when she learned that her elderly husband had met and at least flirted with Nita Selim at a chorus girls' party....
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