Free Flower for a Bride by Barbara Rowan

a white evening dress, with a red rose fastened to the front of it, and a Spanish shawl was falling from her shoulders.
    Lois thought she would have made a wonderful wife for a Marquis de Valerira, but unfortunately she had not lived long enough to grace such an exalted position as that.
    “Well? ’ Miss Gregg enquired curiously, as Lois remained silent.
    “There is something about her eyes,” Lois remarked. “A
    certain indolence.”
    “Portuguese women are often indolent,” Miss Mattie replied. “Probably the climate has something to do with it. They haven’t the fire of Spanish women, but they are just as beautiful.”
    As Lois went on gazing at the portrait she thought that that must be the explanation of the thing that puzzled her. The face lacked animation—fire—because its owner had by nature been an indolent person. Sensuality, perhaps, was in the full redness of the mouth, a touch of the mocking humor Dom Julyan himself displayed sometimes; but true emotion was altogether absent from the face. It was not a mask, but a reflection of the inertia behind it.
    And Lois recalled Dom Julyan’s rapier-like alertness when his mask of indifference slipped, the curious vividness and charm of his smile. Behind his aristocratic composure there lay something quite different to inertia.
    She turned away from the portrait, and without making any more comments walked towards the library door. The governess followed her, thoughtful eyes on the back of the soft fair head.
    They spent the afternoon out of doors in the garden, Lois relaxing comfortably in a long chair with a foot-rest, which Jamie padded with cushions, so that the comfort should be complete. Miss Gregg went on with a piece of her eternal sewing, and while Lois watched her and thought half enviously that she, at least, was secure for the rest of her life, and that even although she might never see her home country again, her adopted land was very kind to her, the faded little English governess talked to her about her present charge’s father, and how much she had always thought of him.
    “He was such a handsome boy,” she said proudly. “Much more vital and alive than his son, I’m afraid, will
    ever be ------------ ” Taking care to make the observation
    when the child was out of ear-shot. “But, then, Dom Julyan was a thoroughly normal child, and he had a very normal mother. She was a delightful person, and I was very happy while she was alive. Julyan was very devoted to her, too.”
    “Dom Julyan seems very capable of devotion,” Lois remarked, with apparent casualness. “First his mother, and now his son!”
    “But not—so far—a wife!” putting ridiculously tiny stitches into the small sleeve of a shirt. “I wanted you to see Donna Valerira’s portrait because now, perhaps, you will believe me when I tell you that was no love match. Not on either side.”
    Lois looked at her in considerable amazement.
    “I shall never get used to Portuguese ways,” she admitted. And then she remembered Jay, and her amazement increased. “Even my own cousin—that, too, was to be a kind of marriage of convenience! It is extraordinary.”
    “But happily it came to nothing,” Miss Mattie observed complacently. “I don’t mind telling you, my dear, that I was never attracted to your cousin, and I knew very well she was not the right sort of wife for Dom Julyan. Because I know him very well I consider that his first marriage was a mistake, and I didn’t want to see him make another. I’ve always hoped that when he did marry again he would choose someone he could—well, let us say ‘care’ for.” “And you know that he didn’t care for Jay?”
    “I knew it, yes.”
    “Then perhaps he will—choose someone else before long?”
    Miss Mattie put down her sewing and looked rather more seriously at Lois. In fact, she even looked, for an instant, a trifle grave.
    “That is what I am inclined to believe,” she confessed. “In fact