This Merry Bond by Sara Seale

never kept my name when I married Hilary,” said Aunt Alice coldly, who was always torn between a belief that the Bredons were the salt of the earth and a secret irritation at their calm acceptance of the fact.
    “That was different, dear,” said Mrs. Bredon-Thomas blandly. “But Nicky is the last of her line and the name should be carried on.”
    “Well, we’ll talk about it later on,” said Nicky, and went and sat by Mary Shand, who was thinking with longing of her own overcrowded and overheated drawing room at home.
    But Mrs. Bredon-Thomas was not to be so easily put off. When the men joined them again, she said firmly during a lull in the conversation:
    “I was telling Nicky, my dear Charles, that she must insist on keeping her own name as well as her new one when she’s married.”
    “Why?” asked Hilary Bredon a little wearily.
    “For obvious reasons. She’s the last of her line. It’s quite simple—all done at Somerset House. Don’t you agree, Simon?”
    “No, said Simon, “I can’t say I do.”
    He was standing a little apart from the others, smoking a cigarette, and had spoken very little the whole evening.
    “You don ’ t !” Mrs. Bredon-Thomas exclaimed incredulously. “But good gracious me, young man, why ever not? My husband raised no objection when I married him. He said he was only too proud to have the name of Bredon joined to his own.”
    “But don’t you think,” said Simon in the gentle voice Nicky was beginning to recognize as dangerous, “that when a woman marries a man, his name alone should be good enough for her? It’s the usual thing, you know.”
    “Quite,” said Hilary Bredon’s dry tones behind her, but John Shand, whose color had become more and more choleric as the conversation proceeded, broke in with a roar that made everyone jump.
    “I’m durned if I’ll have any nonsense of that sort,” he said, bringing one clenched fist down into the palm of his other hand. “If the name of Shand isn’t good enough for you, Nicky, then you can do without it.”
    Nicky, standing straight and stiff beside Mary Shand, met his angry stare with one equally angry.
    “Durn nonsense!” Shand went on furiously. “All this new-fangled talk. You don’t think the name good enough for you—any of you. That’s all it amounts to.”
    “It wasn’t I who said it,” Nicky retorted.
    “Don’t be a fool, Nick,” came Charles’s lazy tones. “We all seem to be very heated over something which, as far as I’m aware, has never been mentioned before. How about a four for bridge? Will you play, Shand?”
    “Never learnt the game,” the old man muttered, and crossed the room to his wife.
    “Oh, dear,” twittered Mrs. Bredon-Thomas, a little taken aback at the result of her remarks. “I do seem to have made you all angry. I only thought that as Nicky would have to leave Nye .. .” She trailed off into silence, but Nicky felt an unfamiliar stab of pain. Leave Nye! She had never even thought about it. For the first time she realized what her marriage was going to mean. She would leave all this, the heritage of five hundred years, to make her home with a stranger.
    She heard Charles reply to some question she had missed.
    “Oh, I shall shut the place up and go abroad again. I’m afraid our stately home of England is a bit of a white elephant really.” Charles didn’t really care, Nicky thought unhappily. He only wanted to be free to roam away the rest of his days in the pleasant spots of the world.
    Simon, watching her across the room, had seen the pain in her face, a pain that sharpened her features into unfamiliar lines and found an echo in his own face. He remembered her as he had first seen her that day in early autumn running between the chestnuts, her eager feet impatient to carry her swiftly to the house, and he went over to her and put an arm around her thin shoulders.
    “Come and play for me,” he said gently. “I’ve always wanted to hear you again.”
    She sat