Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/148

 a little over; twenty-six, to be exact. So you are my senior.'

'Very much your senior. I am an old married woman! I have been married for years and years!'

'Have you indeed?' Mademoiselle Ludérac glanced at Graham.

'Five whole years. And I think when one's happily married it seems to have been for ever. One can't remember oneself not married, as it were.'

'That would bear out the pretty belief that happy marriages are made in heaven,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac with her smile.

It came to Jill, then, how unlikely it was that Mademoiselle Ludérac would ever be happily married; it was as unlikely as that she would ever wear a pink dress and silver shoes. Poor French girls, who had no friends, did not get married. Yet how redeemed from its desolation would the Manoir not have been could Marthe Ludérac have married and had a young family about her.

'Did you live here always when you were a child?' asked Jill, carrying on her thought. 'Were you a country girl like me?'

'We always came here for the summers,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, and, though her gaze remained as gentle and as steady as before, Jill saw that it was altered. 'But I lived, too, in Angoulême.'

'In Angoulême! That wonderful old city, with the cathedral on the hill and the terrace looking over the plain!'