Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter Theee Aline Alexandra Victoria Hayvvard married Jack Forrest at Little Hempstead, next parish to Hadalstone. She was a month short of seventeen years old. Forrest had procured a special licence. There was not the slightest difficulty about getting the ceremony performed. The bleer-eyed country parson, hanging on to his stipend twenty years after his capacity for earning it was exhausted, made them man and wife without comment, thought or spoken. He hurried over the beautiful words, mumbling them with unseemly haste. His comfortable library chair called to him; he was back in it, and fast asleep before Aline had done more than realise that, when Jack Forrest took the liberty of kissing her, he smelt of tobacco and made her feel sick. This was when she had been married an hour. The story this book has to tell is not the story of the married life of Aline and Jack Forrest. A week of it, told truly, as it dare not, and must not, be told, might be trusted to destroy the dangerous germ of romance in some girl-reader's heart, and set her mending stockings, or even sweeping floors, with trembling thankfulness for an employment, independent and solitary. Impatience at Fraulein Eckelstein, sentimental dreaming over her father's personality, and the excitement provided by kitchen literature, were all Aline knew of emotion at the end of May. Before the beginning of June, she had learnt terror, pain, disgust, a horrible self-loathing, and shame in its most degrading form. She cried nearly all the week, not the light pasionate tears of childhood, but the bitter ones of a miserable dawning womanhood. She was sick several times, she had fits of shuddering when the jockey came near her; she changed from a pretty child, with her proud little head in the air, and her blue eyes brigh...