THE AMATEUR LOVER
ate it with? "she mocked. "Why, if I had any- thing left to create it with, I'd be only a me chanic!"
Then, blackened like a coal-heaver and tousled like a Skye terrier, she picked up the scarlet bellows and commenced to pump a savage yellow flame into a writhing. half-charred bundle of letters.
Through all the sweet, calm hours of that warm June night the sacrifice progressed with amazing rapacity. By midnight she had just finished stirring the fire-tongs through the ghostly, lacelike ashes of her wedding gown. At two o clock her violin went groaning into the flames. At three her Big Brother, yawning sleepily back in his nightclothes, picked her up bodily and dumped her into her bed. He was very angry. "Little Sister," he scolded, "there's no man living worth the fuss you're making over Aleck Reese!" And the little sister sat up and rubbed her smutty, scorched cheek against his cool, blue-shaven face as she tilted the drifting ashes from the bedspread. "I'm not making any 'fuss,' "she protested. "I'm only just-burning my bridges." It was the first direct allusion that she had ever made to her trouble.
Twice after that-between three o'clock and breakfast time -the Big Brother woke from his sleep with a horrid sense that the house was on fire.
Twice between three o'clock and breakfast time he
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