Rose in the Bud by Susan Barrie

believed to be a substantial legacy. Was this the time to undeceive him ? Oughtn’t she to grasp the opportunity and tell him the truth?
    Then, very slowly, she lifted her eyes, and what she saw in his caused her to feel as if her breath had been literally snatched away from her, and all thoughts of money and possessions were whipped away from her, too. Moroc’s face was serious, the mouth purposeful, the eyes dark and infinitely revealing. He breathed a little huskily, as if in protest:
    “ Why are you so sweet? So distractingly sweet! Your hair in the sunlight is molten gold, and yet when it is night it is shadowy as a brown mouse. Your eyes are like transparent pools, and your mouth—”
    He caught her close, and this time she felt his mouth devouring her own, actually bruising it. His arms held her so fiercely she was afraid her ribs would crack, but it didn’t seem to matter ... Nothing mattered except the approach of the moment when he would put her out of his arms.
    She couldn’t bear the thought of it. It detracted from the sheer bliss of being kissed by him, and it made her instinctively lift her arms and wind them about his neck. Although when, in almost the next moment, he unfastened her clinging fingers and put her quite deliberately away from him, she knew she had simply invited this attempt on his part to return to rationality.
    He was pale, and he was breathing quickly, but he was not under the same sort of spell that she was under.
    “Oh, Cathleen,” he exclaimed huskily, “I don’t want to fall in love with you! I have made up my mind that I will not fall in love with you, and yet—” Abashed as well as humiliated, she turned away and wandered over to his paintings. Giovanni came into the room with a tray of coffee, and Edouard called across to her to know whether she preferred it black or white. She was about to answer that she had no particular preference when she turned over one of the canvases, and he saw her stand stock still in amazement.
    He walked across to her.
    “But this—this portrait...” she said unbelievingly. “It’s Arlette! Arlette must have allowed you to paint her!”
    “Yes,” he answered, regarding her with inscrutable eyes. “And what if she did ? ”
    Speech almost failed her. The portrait of Arlette was as good as a living likeness ... and at the same time everything about Arlette, the beauty of her hair, her eyes, her remarkable skin, was enhanced. There was an atmosphere of unreality about the portrait, just as there was an atmosphere of unreality about the corner of the waterway. In each case the subject had received the kind of treatment that emphasised a quality that probably did not exist ... and which was a glamorising treatment in itself.
    Arlette, as Edouard had seen her, had few defects. The weakness that Cathleen knew lay close to the corner s of her petulant mouth, and in the depths of her unlevel eyes, had not been faithfully reproduced. It was Arlette as someone infatuated by her might see her. And it was Arlette painted against the very velvet curtain that draped the model’s throne in the studio.
    “You—you brought her here to paint her,” she whispered, as if she couldn’t quite believe it. “I thought you said you never brought anyone here because you objected to them prying into your private life.”
    “I don’t—and I do,” he replied shortly. He went across to the picture that she had placed against the wall and turned it abruptly with its face to the sea-green satin damask that covered the original painted wall. “Arlette acted as my model, and I brought her here because I couldn’t very well paint her anywhere else, and in any case she wanted the money. She was hard up.”
    “You—you paid her for her services?”
    “But of course.” He turned and regarded her in astonishment.
    Cathleen bit her lip.
    “You have many models like Arlette?”
    “I have painted a good few beautiful women—yes.”
    “You brought me here to