The Little French Girl

A clock struck eight, a loud yet distant clock. The strokes, Alix thought, seemed to glide downwards rather than to fall through the fog and tumult of the station, and, counting...

Alix opened her eyes. Someone was standing still before her. Of all the footsteps that came and went, these had stopped. For a moment, so deeply was she sunk in the vision of th...

For many hours the little French girl slept on dreamlessly, and when she woke it was as if an abyss of space and time lay between her and yesterday morning. As she gazed up at t...

The third-class carriage was not foul and wooden as it would have been in France, and they had it to themselves; but the cushions smelt of fog, and Alix thought she had never se...

She was not to escape Ruth and Rosemary for long. Already, at lunch, she felt that Giles, talking gravely with his mother of treaties and leagues and such dull matters, seemed t...

“Tell me everything; everything you remember,” said Toppie. She was striding along over the heather, a grey woollen scarf tossed over her shoulder, a knitted cap drawn down clos...

The village choir was a feeble enough little affair, its energy concentrated in Giles’s disciplined, sustaining baritone and the robust sopranos of Ruth, Rosemary, and the postm...

They were all in the drawing-room after dinner—all except Francis and Jack who had gone to bed;—Ruth writing, Rosemary altering a blouse and Giles reading in his accustomed plac...

It was evident to Alix, thinking and thinking of it in the day and night that followed her talk with Giles, that the best way of helping him was not to be there at all. The grea...

She and Mrs. Bradley motored home together next day. It had stopped raining and the air had the unexpected softness that mid-winter in England can mitigatingly display. Alix had...

“_C’est la France_,” said Alix. She leaned beside him on the railing of the Channel steamer and looked through the blue of the July day to where the town thinly shaped itself, l...

The train moved slowly, almost ruminatingly, along the golden landscape, a little local train stopping at every station. The crops were still uncut and their vast undulations we...

He could hardly find again the face of the February day in the Bois. It was her form, her poise that gave her to one now, and Giles’s first impression of the white, sunlit figur...

Madame Vervier rearranged the tray, setting the tongs on the sugar, the strainer on a cup, placing the plate of _madeleines_ here, the _brioches_ there; all mildly, with no savo...

He had not imagined madame Vervier coming down to breakfast; but she was up long before it. Giles, looking from his window at seven, was astonished to see her form, wrapped in a...

“_C’est la belle madame Vervier_,” said a contemplative voice behind him, and Giles, glancing round, as he sat in the thatched chalet overlooking the tennis courts, saw that it...

He had mounted the steps, head bent, hands thrust deeply into his pockets, and had actually cast himself into a garden-chair before he saw that he was not alone. Over there in t...

It was strange to meet them all again that evening, so unchanged to their own consciousness, so changed to his. Strange to find them still so charming and so to shrink from thei...

Madame Vervier did not come down to breakfast next morning. Giles had heard a murmur of voices in the room next his till late into the night and he saw from Alix’s eyes that she...

It was not until next day, after luncheon, that the time came, and Giles—as madame Vervier said to him, “I find it too hot for tennis to-day. Will you stay behind and talk with...

“There are many things to consider,” madame Vervier pursued, simply and tranquilly, while Giles sat transfixed. “I should have to think of many things.—Your position; your prosp...

The tennis-players returned at tea-time, bringing monsieur Claussel with them. He was a young man with shy, soft, prominent dark eyes and the smallest dot of a dark moustache on...

Next day, his last at Les Chardonnerets, dawned high, blue, beautiful, and looking out at sunrise Giles saw his wonderful hostess, as he had seen her on his first morning, walki...

“Then she is coming back. I am so glad. I was afraid, from things she said, once or twice, about herself, about her life in France with her mother, that she might not be coming,...

Giles, while Toppie spoke, had started up, resting on his hand and staring at her with eyes aghast and stupefied. What folly, what madness was this? How could Toppie find it in...

He was waiting for her on the Victoria platform and his patient gaze and poise told her that her train was late;—but fatigue did not account for what Alix saw at once as she sto...

If Toppie, too, was changed, she was not changed to her. That was the first thing that Alix felt when she saw her again; next day;—for a note had been waiting for her at Heathsi...

The old life flowed round her again, outwardly the same, inwardly so altered. She had been, she saw it, like nothing but a glass of _eau sucrée_ when she had first come to Heath...

It was in the last fortnight of the holidays that a letter, once more, came from Lady Mary asking, as if only a few weeks had elapsed since the last time of asking, if Alix coul...

“And you will see that Blaise is happy until I come back, Giles?” said Alix, as she stood beside the car next morning to say good-bye. “And you will write to me?”

Under pressure from Giles, who wrote that of course she must stay on, Alix’s visit to Cresswell Abbey lengthened itself over the whole remaining fortnight of the holidays. She w...

It was only a few days after this interview that the news of Mr. Westmacott’s death reached them. Toppie spent ten days in Bath with friends before returning to the Rectory, and...

Toppie stood in the middle of the room with open packing-cases around her. The sun came in and shone upon the walls and the room looked pale and high and vacant. There were no f...

“Oh, Maman!—What have I done to you!” It was her own voice now that Alix heard. She was out again upon the common and she had been running. But suddenly she was walking very slo...

Two faces were with Giles that night as he turned, sleepless, again and again, on his pillow; Alix’s face, and Toppie’s face. Toppie was before him as he had seen her on the Aut...

When Giles got back to his study, he found Alix there, looking out of the window. The sound of Lady Mary’s motor had hardly died away. He saw that there was nothing now that cou...

He saw Alix off next day. Her departure cast consternation through the Bradley household. An unfortunate love affair, the fact that Alix did not wish to marry Jerry Hamble, coul...

Before Giles went back to Oxford a short letter came to Mrs. Bradley from Toppie saying that she was going to stay on in Bath for the present and that her determination to becom...

Giles did not believe in what his dear Toppie had told him; did not believe that the fairy princess could ever be for him; but the thought of her words hovered round him as if h...

Giles, as he leaned out of the train, almost expected to see the white form of madame Vervier awaiting him on the platform as she had awaited him and Alix last year. His heart t...

On the verandah Alix sat beside monsieur de Maubert reading “Bérénice,” aloud to him. André was stretched near them in a deck-chair, his eyes following the smoke of his cigarett...

When Giles came down to breakfast next morning, Alix was already there, setting a bowl of nasturtiums on the blue-and-white cloth. He had not had a word with her last night when...