The Truant Spirit Read Online Free PDF Page B

arrangements for this room, and she wished, in spite of the welcoming peat fire, that she could have slept elsewhere. She did not want to be reminded of the inconvenience she had caused him.
    Bunny had left her to fetch what might be required for the night, and she returned now with a few necessities and laid an old-fashioned nightdress carefully on the bed.
    “Not what you’re used to, no doubt, but it will serve,” she said, and Sabina experienced a wild desire to laugh.
    The nightdress was of flannelette with long sleeves gathered at the wrists and a high buttoned neck finished modestly with feather-stitching. She could hear Tante exclaiming with horror: “Mon dieu, c’est incroyable!”
    “The bathroom is next door. There is a nightlight there, but mind the steps,” Bunny said, casting a last practised glance about the room. “If you are not accustomed to an oil lamp don’t touch it except to blow it out. They smitch very easily.”
    “Smitch?”
    “Smoke. It’s a west-country expression. Good night, my dear, and I hope you’ll feel better in the morning.”
    “Thank you. Good night, Miss—Miss Bunny, and I’m sorry to be such a trouble,” said Sabina and immediately blushed.
    Of course Brock’s ex-governess was no longer “Miss,” neither was her surname Bunny. A faint smile touched Bunny’s rather prim mouth but she made no correction. She observed the blush with interest and quietly left the room and went downstairs.
    Sabina stood in the middle of the big room and tried to find fresh amusement in contemplating the nightdress. But the nightdress no longer seemed funny. It looked more like a shroud than a relic of Edwardian propriety, and, remembering the graves so close beneath her window, Sabina sat down on the floor and wept with sudden desolation.
    Morning brought no relief to the situation and for Sabina the unhappy knowledge that, however unwilling, she must trespass further on this grudging hospitality, for she had been sick all night, falling repeatedly down the bathroom steps despite Bunny’s warning, and when daylight came she was weak and tearful and the fever of the night before had mounted.
    “I must get Dr. Northy to have a look at her,” Bunny told Brock when they met at breakfast. “I don’t think it’s more than a chill and possibly some sort of emotional disturbance, but the girl’s a stranger to us. We cannot run any risks.”
    Brock’s frown was dark and brooding, reminding her of those bitter weeks after his accident.
    “I shouldn’t have brought her here,” he said, “but she was virtually stranded and, discounting the preposterous yarn she spun me at first, she really didn’t seem very fit to fend for herself.”
    “The preposterous yarn presumably had something to do with the nonsense you were talking last night,” Bunny observed. “Had she invented some tall story in order to get free lodging for the night?”
    “I thought so at first, but later—well, she produced some rather startling facts which can be verified or not. What did you make of her?”
    “A nice child, I think,” she replied after a pause. “I felt more sure of her as soon as she blushed.”
    “As soon as she blushed?” His eyebrows went up, but he remembered at the same time Sabina’s vivid blush at the landlord’s comments in the little public-house at Kairy. “What had you been saying to her, Bunny?”
    “When she said good night she addressed me as Miss Bunny and then went scarlet with embarrassment. The young don’t blush any more, Brock. When you find one that does there is usually something tender and vulnerable about them.”
    “You think so? Yet this girl, if she is to be believed, is quite ready to marry a man whom she has never seen and whom she doesn’t appear to have very flattering ideas about.”
    She looked across at him with the tolerant expression with which he had been familiar in his boyhood.
    ‘Perhaps you had better try to explain,” she said. “Who, in any