Final Break (son veda)

Final Break

They had been walking along Oxford Street. Now they stopped, Greg's hand on her arm.
“This is the place,” he said. “I thought you might get the sort of thing you liked here.”
Helen nodded, but there were tears in her eyes as she looked through the shop-window. The new hat had been his idea, not hers.
“What about the black one?” He pointed. “It would go with your suit!”
Her lips trembled. One of the little things she loved so much about him was the really genuine interest he had always taken in what she wore. It had made you feel young, somehow, loved, though in your heart you knew you were young no longer.
“Yes. Yes, it would, wouldn't it?” She carefully avoided meeting his eyes, because there was so much in her own eyes that he must never see.
They went into the shop. A clerk appeared to wait on them.
Helen described the hat. It was in the window.
She was wishing now that they had never come into the shop. But Greg had been insistent. He wanted to give her something. A parting gift, he had called it.
He was smiling now out of blue, untroubled eyes. Which surprised her. And yet why should it, she asked herself, as she took the hat from the clerk and placed it on her blue-gray hair?