The
Little French Girl
BY
ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK
(Mrs. Basil de Sélincourt)
Author of “Adrienne Toner,” “Christmas Roses, and Other Stories”
“Tante,” etc.
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ANNE DOUGLAS DE SÉLINCOURT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
SECOND IMPRESSION, AUGUST, 1924
THIRD IMPRESSION, SEPTEMBER, 1924
FOURTH IMPRESSION, SEPTEMBER, 1924
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
The Little French Girl
PART I
CHAPTER I
A clock struck eight, a loud yet distant clock. Thestrokes, Alix thought, seemed to glide downwardsrather than to fall through the fog and tumult of thestation, and, counting them as they emerged, theywere so slow and heavy that they made her think oftawny drones pushing their way forth from amongthe thickets of hot thyme in the jardin potager atMontarel. Sitting straightly in her corner of theVictoria waiting-room, the little French girl fixed hermind upon the picture thus evoked so that she shouldnot feel too sharply the alarming meaning of the hour,and seemed again to watch the blunt, sagacious facesof the drones as they paused in sulky deliberation onthe tip of a spray before launching themselves intothe sunlight. What could be more unlike Montarelthan this cold and paltry scene? What more unlikethat air, tranced with sunlight and silence, than thisdense atmosphere? Yet the heavy, gliding notesbrought back the drones so vividly that she foundherself again in the high-terraced garden under thesun-baked old château. The magnolia-trees ate intothe crumbling walls and opened lemon-scented cupsbeneath her as she leaned her arms on the hot stoneand looked across the visionary plains to the Alps onthe horizon, blue, impalpable, less substantial to thesight than the clouds that sailed in grandiose snowyfleets above them. Alix had always felt that it waslike taking great breaths to see the plains and likespreading immense wings to see the mountains, andsomething of invulnerable dignity, of inaccessibleremoteness in her demeanour as she sat there mightwell have been derived from generations who hadlived and died in the presence of natural sublimities.Her brows were contemplative, her lips proud. Shewas evidently a foreigner, a creature nurtured inclimes golden yet austere and springing from an aromatic,rocky soil. The pallor of