Free And Be Thy Love by Rose Burghley

and found her there, being treated like an honoured guest by someone he would have to recompense.
    “I do feel that I ought to have found a little hotel and gone there,” she said, more than once, to a Robert who had joined forces with Monique in spoiling her as much as it was possible to
    spoil one single human being. (And that a very ordinary English girl, as she looked upon herself.) “Staying here like this is an imposition. It would have been different if Marthe was here.”
    “But Marthe is not here!” His eyes roved over her with a kind of gentle amusement, and he bent forward to adjust the cushion behind her back, and enquired whether she would like another for additional comfort. She shook her smooth and gleaming head.
    “I am supremely comfortable.”
    “Actually, it is I who should find a little hotel!” he looked at her rather sombrely. “Do you realise that by remaining here I am likely to create a certain amount of talk? And even in out-of-the-way French villages like this one near here people do talk, you know!”
    “W-what about?” she asked, although she knew perfectly well what he meant. She avoided meeting his eyes, those velvet-brown eyes that were doing such extraordinary things to her. “Monique is here too, and the— the children....”
    “And Jacqueline, the cat who is always creating the need for drowning kittens...! And the fat kitten from the last litter who has not yet acquired a name, but is the property of Marie-Josette! And perhaps Marie-Josette is the best chaperone of all, for she doesn’t leave us alone together very much, does she?” with the whimsicalness back in his eyes.
    It was true that Marie-Josette followed them practically everywhere, and even on short drives she accompanied them sometimes, her un-named kitten purring contentedly in her lap. She seemed to have staked a kind of claim where de Bergerac was concerned, and looked possessive every time he was near, and even glanced occasionally with faint hostility in her enormous grey eyes at Caroline, because she was always awarded the seat beside the driving seat, and was so noticeably fussed-over. Caroline felt a little amused, realising that this was the true feminine jealousy that, later on, would make her rather a dangerous young woman to play fast and loose with. And at the moment she had a hero, and she adored him.
    But she didn’t always accompany them on their drives, and there were days when the two of them went off together in the cream car, days when Monique packed them up a picnic basket, the contents of which they later enjoyed beside the stream, or in some cool glade of the forest where civilisation seemed far away, and they might have been back in mediaeval France, with the deep silence beneath the trees emphasising their aloneness.
    It was on these occasions that they talked a good deal— perhaps in order to forget that pregnant silence that seemed to press upon them in the green gloom that surrounded them, waiting for them to become aware of other things apart from conversation. Apart from Robert’s description of the Luxembourg Gardens in spring, lilies of the valley on sale everywhere in Paris at the beginning of May, the Horse Show in the Bois de Boulogne, gala performances at the Opera. He talked so much about Paris that she began to feel she had done far more than pass through it, and although she wouldn’t admit it— preferring to cling to her pre-conceived notion that, compared with London, it was a frivolous city, likely to appeal only to those who were naturally rather frivolous-minded—she did begin to be conscious of a desire to see something of it one day.
    He whetted her appetite for the sight of tree-lined streets greening over, as it were, in a night, after a particularly hard winter. Wide avenues where the sun found it possible to gild everything, because they were so open, and shop windows that would tempt even the most nunlike female, if she was a female at all. It was only when