Free Rose in the Bud by Susan Barrie

must return you to your hotel !”
    He kissed her eyes, and an end of her soft brown hair that had blown into them, and then he sat well away from her and ordered the gondolier a little impatiently, in Italian, to increase his rate of speed.
    “It is late,” he exclaimed, “and at this rate you will not be in bed before the sun is up! You will have to forgive me, Cathleen, for being so extremely thoughtless and keeping you up so late!” Although his voice was perfectly steady there was a strained note in it, and she was not entirely deceived. “At home in England, I have no doubt, you would have been safely tucked up in your bed long before this.”
    “Y es, but I am not in England,” she reminded him, a faint, emotional bubble of laughter in her voice. “I am in Italy.”
    He glanced at her, and his expression softened again. He reached for her hand and squeezed it hard.
    “I had no right to do that, Cathleen,” he admitted wryly, “but you should not be so entrancing if you do not expect to be kissed. It was the first time, no?” a little more sharply, with rather a harsh query in his voice.
    She decided to be strictly truthful.
    “It was the first time it—it mattered.”
    “Meaning ? ”
    “The other times they were very young men ... men who were merely being polite after a dance. That sort of thing happens, you know. It—it doesn’t mean anything.”
    “I am not the one to whom you should pass on information of that sort,” he commented drily.
    She said a little flatly:
    “You mean you know... ? Even in Italy it is a kind of custom? All part of the—the glamour you were talking about just now?”
    “What else?” But the brutality of his rejoinder was softened by his hand reaching out and again touching her cheek. “ Cara , you are attempting to be serious, and this is not a serious hour. It is the hour when people should come to terms with themselves, but not with—other people.” He glanced upwards at the sky, the density of dark blue velvet that hung like a canopy above their heads, and it was already paling before the approach of dawn, and low down on the horizon a line of gold was extending and would shortly become a mixture of rose and flame and orange, and fill the whole of the eastern sky. In a matter of less than an hour the wonderful light of Venice would spring into being, and the hot sunlight would be soaking itself into every corner of the canals.
    “Dawn is for reflection,” he said soberly, “not for commitments.”
    He left her at her hotel—and she suddenly found herself curious as to where it was that he lived himself, and why in the course of their conversations she had never yet attempted to find out.
    Perhaps she assumed that he was staying in an hotel. Perhaps she assumed that he had an apartment somewhere.
    “The plan we made yesterday is no longer practical,” he told her, smiling at her in the increasing, revealing light. “You will sleep now until nearly noon if you are wise, otherwise we shall have you with dark circles under your eyes when you wish to be at your best. But I promise I will call for you soon after lunch, if that is what you would wish yourself?” His formal method of phrasing reminded her sometimes that he was not a fellow countryman, and although he was an Italian—she was glad of that because it prevented him being voluble and theatrical—his French ancestry (particularly Norman French) gave him a certain distant glamour which was a little like pure glamour overlaid with common sense.
    Edouard Moroc would never be stampeded, and she doubted very much whether he could be cajoled. But he was a man—an extremely personable and strangely attractive man—and she knew he admired her.
    As she ran lightly up the hotel steps and then turned to wave to him she saw that he was staring up at her very gravely.
    Sleep well,” he called. “And be ready by three o’clock!”

 
    CHAPTER V
    She s lept so late that her lunch was a hurried affair, and