Free The Truant Spirit by Sara Seale

we receive your aunt’s reply.”
    “I’ve kept secrets from Marthe before,” she said happily. “Mr. Brockman—it was your idea, wasn’t it? You persuaded Mrs. Fennell to write?”
    He drew back from her eager hands, and his face was as she remembered it first, hard and saturnine and a little forbidding.
    “I?” he said with deliberate withdrawal. “It makes no difference to me; I’m only here for a little while, anyway. You have Bunny to thank, not me—and perhaps the good doctor, too.”
    She felt immediately chilled, and, putting her hands behind her back, edged away, feeling that it had been an impertinence to touch him.
    “Yes, I see,” she said. “But perhaps I would be a nuisance. Perhaps it would be better if I waited for Tante where she expects to find me.”
    “Bunny isn’t acting from a sense of duty,” he replied. “You would be doing her a good turn by bringing a little unexpected grist to the mill. Whether you turn out to be a nuisance is, of course, entirely your own affair.”
    It did not sound encouraging and she looked at him with her old indecision.
    “I wouldn’t make extra work,” she said. “In fact I could help with lots of things. I only have to be shown how.”
    He lifted his eyebrows but made no reply, and she stood there uncertainly, not knowing what to say next.
    “Well, anyway,” she said at last, turning away, “you’ll be able to have your room back. I’m sorry I’ve kept you out of it for so long.”
    He grinned, but still made no comment, and Sabina went slowly back to the fire and sat down to brood uncertainly on her change of fortune.
    But, later, her mood altered. Even if Brock had made it clear that whether she stayed on or not made little difference to him, Bunny had been gracious.
    “If you want to stay and won’t be bored with our quiet life here, then I shall be very pleased, Sabina,” she said. “I like you, child, and I think the break would do you good. I may seem elderly and prim to you, but a governess has an odd affinity with youth. I would like to know you better, my dear.”
    “You are so kind, Mrs. Fennell,” Sabina said humbly. “I only hope my aunt will give permission.”
    “I’m sure she will,” Bunny replied with the same little air of certainty that Brock had shown. “And since I hope we will be friends, you had better start calling me Bunny, like everyone else.”
    “How did you get that name?” Sabina asked affectionately, thinking again how like a rabbit she could look at times.
    Bunny smiled.
    “I was a Miss Bunson in my governessing days, so the abbreviation was obvious,” she said. “I remember when Brock was small we used to play an absurd game; for his surname, too, had been shortened, and we were boon companions of the wild—the rabbit and the badger.”
    “The badger?”
    “Brock is the country name for a badger—did you not know?”
    “No,” said Sabina, feeling ignorant under Bunny’s mild but inquiring gaze.
    “There will be lots to teach you,” Bunny said, looking rather pleased, and Sabina had the strange feeling that the precise, rather colourless little woman had missed her old pupils and the pleasure of imparting information to receptive minds.
    But to Marthe none of them said anything. Sabina, waiting impatiently for her aunt’s reply, hugged her secret to herself and paid little heed to the Frenchwoman’s continual grumbling. Even the most barbed reproofs were received without
    resentment and Marthe began to be worried.
    Sabina had shaken her confidence that afternoon when both speech and manner had been those of an adult person. Since that day her charge had been subtly different, and Marthe thought she knew where to lay the blame. This governess who had never lost the stamp of her profession and who worked in the house like one of her own servants, could have made little impression on a young girl about to marry into a rich family, but M. Brockman ... there was the one who would turn the head