Love is for Ever by Barbara Rowan Page B

blossom imprisoned by the high white walls, the long shadows falling across the grass, that was short and sweet and thick and heady with a perfume all its own, and suddenly a kind of wistfulness dropped upon her like a cloak. For before very long she would have to leave all this behind—say goodbye to it for ever!—and it was Martine who should have been included in the senora’s little speech.
    She stole a look at Dominic, and he was lying back in his chair, looking curiously relaxed and happier almost than she had seen him before, with a faint smile on the mouth that was so perfectly shaped—so perfectly shaped that Jacqueline felt her heart do something extremely odd inside her as she looked at it; for one moment her heart seemed to expand with admiration, with a sudden upward rush of approval. And when she looked at his eyes, with their smoky screens of eyelashes—the lazy blue gleam that appeared beneath the eyelashes as he caught her watching him—her heart started to contract.
    For he was far, far too handsome, too wealthy, too assured— too much belonging to another world— to mean anything at all in her life.
    She wasn’t a Martine, who had appeared in films, and wore gorgeous, slinky dresses—she was just Jacqueline Vaizey, at the moment without a job, and with no one of her own to return to when she went back to England.
    Her small face looked suddenly clouded and overcast.
    Dominic looked at her keenly for a moment, and then as she ventured to glance at him again he lifted ids glass to her.
    “To you, Miss Vaizey, and your stay on Sansegovia!”
    “Why do you call the little one Miss Vaizey?” Senora Cortina demanded of her grandson. “She is the daughter of my dear old friend Dr. Vaizey, and her name is Jacqueline. It is too formal to call her Miss Vaizey.”
    Dominic smiled.
    “To you, then, Jacqueline! It is a French name, and pretty, and suits you very well indeed. My grandmother is right—Miss Vaizey is much too formal!”
    Jacqueline felt that sudden, revealing color, over which she always had such little control, rising up in her cheeks, and it made her look young, and shy, and embarrassed. The Senora Cortina touched her cheek almost tenderly with a gnarled finger, and at the same time she looked across at her grandson. She looked at him and her quiet old eyes looked suddenly wise and knowledgeable.
    CHAPTER SEVEN
    Jacqueline dressed that night with a feeling of excitement and pleasurable anticipation she found it impossible to deny. She put on a misty blue chiffon dress with a very full, ballerina-length skirt, and with it she wore silver-gilt sandals and a stole that matched the dress. When she was finally ready she decided that there was not much wrong with her appearance, and that was an opinion heartily endorsed by Juanita when she arrived hastily after lending a great deal of assistance in the room next door.
    Juanita looked a trifle flushed, and even put out, which was unusual with her.
    “That one!” she exclaimed, spreading her hands dramatically, and rolling her eyes a little. “That Senorita Howard!... Tonight I fail to please her! Eso no es possible !” Her hands continued to wave, and her plump shoulders to lift. “First it is the hair that is not right, and then the dress—the fastenings are all wrong! I alter the fastenings, and what then—? The hem itself is wrong!”
    She uttered a sigh of exasperation, and turned away to Jacqueline’s dressing-table and proceeded automatically to straighten the articles on the top of it.
    Jacqueline sat down in a chair and ran a buffer over her pearly-pink nails, which she never varnished.
    “I wouldn’t worry,” she said soothingly. “But have you any idea how soon Miss Howard will be ready?”
    Juanita shrugged her shoulders again.
    “It might be any time, senorita.” And then, her conscience pricking her because she had done so little for Jacqueline: “I will fetch you a glass of sherry and a biscuit to partake of while you