An English Rose Author:Helen Mathers Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: a good twenty minutes yet, so there is plenty of time." "I'm glad I managed to get here in time. I wanted to see you, Georgie, to ask you to take special care... more » of Cicely. I don't want anything to happen to her in France." "What could possibly happen to her?" asked Lady Winyard in a slightly ironical voice. "We're not going anywhere near the firing-line. Cceur la Reine is at least thirty miles back." "Battle lines have a habit of swinging to and fro," he reminded her. "And the Germans are making progress in France, worse luck. But it wasn't so much mere bodily danger I was thinking of as the other sort. She mustn't get in with undesirables, Georgie. And, above all, please remember I don't want her to marry a Frenchman." "Keep your mind at rest, Roger. What a worry you are ! But I suppose you can't help it. I'll take care of the child all right. There aren't going to be any high jinks in my hospital, I tell you ! I don't propose to be classed with Kitchener's plague of women after the war is over. I'm out to do a bit of real honest work, and I prefer to do it for France, because—well, perhaps you know why." An extraordinary expression of softness swept across her hard face, and in a flash Roger Marsham understood, remembering the old love affair between his sister and a young attache" at the French Embassy in London that had occasioned so much heart-burning at Lesterford, and had been the theme of many family Hiconclaves. It gave him a strange thrill, such as we all have felt when suddenly we behold unsuspected fires in the hearts of those with whom we have walked side by side, unknowing and unheeding, through grey, quiet years. He did not speak for a moment, and in that moment his sister's mood changed. "I'll take care of her all right, and it is quite time she ...« less