Marry a Stranger by Susan Barrie

let me stay with them. Not that I would even ask them,” she added hastily.
    “Of course you wouldn’t,” he said soothingly, as if that was the last thing he expected her to do. “But you can live in the country just the same.”
    “How?” She looked at him with widened eyes.
    “I have a house in Herefordshire—several miles from your old home, but it was there that your father and I first became acquainted—and you can live there. How would you like that?”
    “Oh, but I couldn’t”—with another trembling sigh in the words, and shaking her head regretfully. “I couldn’t possibly, and you know it.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because — ”
    “Because it wouldn’t be quite co nv enable, as the French say? And as Miss Hunt would probably say as well! And neither probably would it if you went there as Miss Stacey Brent, but as Mrs. Martin Guelder it would be perfectly all right, wouldn’t it? You could stay there as long as you liked.”
    She stared at him. She wondered whether her ears were playing her tricks. Or, possibly, it was the heat—or the after-effects of that unaccustomed sherry!
    “Mrs. — Martin Guelder ... ?”
    “As my wife, yes!”
    She was quite sure, now, that she must be slightly delirious. She went so pale that he looked at her sharply.
    “Feeling all right?” he asked.
    “Yes; perfectly all right, but—did you say—your wife ... ?”
    “I think it would be a good plan if you married me,” he answered her calmly. “It would solve so many problems—yours especially. But if the idea upsets you we’ll talk about it later, perhaps after a cup of tea somewhere.”
    “It doesn’t upset me,” she informed him tremulously, “but—I can’t believe that you know what you’re talking about!”
    She was quite sure that he didn’t know what he was talking about. He, an eminent physician, a man with a future, a man, moreover, quite a number of years older than she was, distinguished, undeniably good-looking—when she glanced at him sideways and saw the clean outline of his profile, with his strong, firm jaw, excellent mouth, good straight nose and clever brow, and the way that dark, crisp wing of his hair dipped towards his eyebrow, her heart almost turned over inside her, because already she knew it to be the only masculine profile in the world she would ever want to gaze at constantly—for him even to think of linking his life with hers was almost laughable. Completely laughable! She, the inexperienced country girl, barely twenty-one, with no background, no family—nothing very much!
    Why, he knew nothing at all about her! They were strangers—or virtually strangers! They had met three times!
    And what of Vera Hunt ... ?
    “Of course, I realize that you are only joking,” she said, trying to sound as if she thought it was an excellent joke herself, as he started up the car with the object of going in search of a place where they could have tea.
    “ Am I?” He was concentrating on the road ahead, but he smiled a little. “Well, we’ll discuss the joke further over a pot of tea and some of the usual highly indigestible pastries, if we can find any!”
    And he declined to say anything further until they were seated facing one another beneath a striped umbrella, on a velvety lawn which ran down to the water’s edge, and a waitress had attended to their wants, and Stacey had accepted a cigarette and he deliberately studied her face while he held a match to the end of it.
    “Well,” he demanded very quietly, then, “what is there so very funny about my asking you to marry me?”
    Stacey’s face flamed. The color actually disappeared under her hair.
    “There’s nothing funny at all, only—you can’t possibly mean it,” she got out, in a little rush.
    “My dear girl,” he expostulated mildly, “it’s not my habit to propose marriage to young women of your age, with no protector behind them, without any intention at all of honoring the proposal. And as a matter of