As Mistral did all these things automatically, she found her aunt’s letters bitterly disappointing, although invariably she experienced a sudden thrill when she saw a letter addressed to herself set out on the table where the girls received their post.

If Aunt Emilie’s letters were few and far between, her visits were even more so. Perhaps once a year she would journey to the Convent, talk with the Mother Superior and later walk in the garden alone with Mistral. Aunt Emilie’s visits were almost as disappointing as her letters. Every sentence she spoke seemed to Mistral to begin with The Reverend Mother tells me that you could do better in – ’

‘The Reverend Mother suggests that you should learn – ’ The Reverend Mother and I think that you are now old enough to begin – ’

It was lessons, lessons, lessons all the time!

Mistral, who looked forward to her aunt’s visits with an almost overexcited eagerness, would find herself shrinking back into her shell of reserve, that same reserve which enabled her to conceal her feelings of utter loneliness from the other girls.

Sometimes at night, when she was alone in her little narrow bed in the dormitory, she used to pretend that her mother’s arms were round her, that she was telling her all the things she thought and felt and that her mother was listening, understanding and sympathising.

Once, hearing sobs from the bed next to hers, Mistral had got out to comfort the miserable girl.

‘What is the matter, Yvonne?’ she asked in a whisper, for they were not supposed to talk after lights were out.

‘I want my mother!’ Yvonne had wept. ‘I want my mother!’

Mistral had soothed her as best she could and tucked her up, then she had crept back, cold and shivering, into her own bed. For the rest of the night she could not sleep. She, too, wanted her mother! She could understand what Yvonne was feeling only too well, but Yvonne’s mother was not far away, a real tangible person, living in a home to which Yvonne would return in three months’ time, and which in a few years’ time, unless she wished to get married, she need never leave again.

It was a very empty thing, Mistral thought in the darkness, to have neither home nor parents, no place that one could call one’s own, no one who cared whether one was ill or well, happy or unhappy, joyful or sad.

It was not often that she let herself dwell on her own loneliness, she was too sensible for that and was also happy by nature. But now she thought it had been an undercurrent to her whole childhood. Always she had a felt a little apart from other girls. They had so many experiences to exchange, treats to which they had been taken during the holidays, the excitements of riding, bathing, skiing or travelling.