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. The strokes, Alix thought, seemed to glide downwards rather than to fall through the fog and tumult of the station, and, counting them as they emerged, they were so slow and heavy that they made her think of tawny drones pushing their way forth from among the thickets of hot thyme in the _jardin potager_ at Montarel. Sitting straightly in her corner of the Victoria waiting-room, the little French girl fixed her mind upon the picture thus evoked so that she should not feel too sharply the alarming meaning of the hour, and seemed again to watch the blunt, sagacious faces of the drones as they paused in sulky deliberation on the tip of a spray before launching themselves into the sunlight. What could be more unlike Montarel than this cold and paltry scene? What more unlike that air, tranced with sunlight and silence, than this dense atmosphere? Yet the heavy, gliding notes brought back the drones so vividly that she found herself again in the high-terraced garden under the sun-baked old château. The magnolia-trees ate into the crumbling walls and opened lemon-scented cups beneath her as she leaned her arms on the hot stone and looked across the visionary plains to the Alps on the horizon, blue, impalpable, less substantial to the sight than the clouds that sailed in grandiose snowy fleets above them. Alix had always felt that it was like taking great breaths to see the plains and like spreading immense wings to see the mountains, and something of invulnerable dignity, of inaccessible remoteness in her demeanour as she sat there might well have been derived from generations who had lived and died in the presence of natural sublimities. Her brows were contemplative, her lips proud. She was evidently a foreigner, a creature nurtured in climes golden yet austere and springing from an aromatic, rocky soil. The pallor of her extreme fatigue could not efface the sunny tones of her