Fragrant Flower by Barbara Cartland Page A

as beautiful and as fragrant as the flower itself – or as her mother!’”
    “You have not answered my question,” Lord Sheldon prompted her.
    “Yes – I have seen the azaleas in the spring,” she answered, and had no idea there was a throb in her voice that had not been there before.
    A man seated on the other side of Lord Sheldon engaged him in conversation, and Azalea felt she had time to get her breath, and hoped the agitation within her breast would gradually fade away.
    How could she have imagined that of all people she would sit next to the man who had kissed her in her uncle’s Study and had first thought her to be a spy and then a servant?
    She glanced down the table at her aunt and realised that she was annoyed that Lord Sheldon should be beside her. She beckoned with her finger and obediently Azalea rose and went to her side.
    “You will change places with Violet,” she said sharply. “There is no reason for the girls always to sit together in this childish manner.”
    It was an excuse, Azalea knew well, to move her from Lord Sheldon’s proximity and while she told herself it would save her from further embarrassment, she could not help regretting being unable to continue their conversation about India.
    He would not have appreciated the country anyway, she told herself. He would have been too busy bullying his Indian servants or drilling the soldiers unmercifully in the heat.
    But there had been something in his voice when he spoke of the azaleas that told her, to her surprise, that he appreciated their beauty – they had meant something to him.
    Could anyone, Azalea asked herself, see such beauty and not long for it again? Even anyone as stiff-necked and unimaginative as Lord Sheldon must be?
    She moved Violet into her place and sat down between the two girls.
    Although Lord Sheldon was talking to the man on his other side she had a feeling, although she could not substantiate it, that he was aware of what had happened and that it was her aunt who had effected the change.
    As Azalea thought that nothing would appear more dull – and in fact ruder – than that three girls should sit in a row and say nothing to each other, she started to talk to Daisy.
    “You must learn to talk and listen, Azalea,” her mother had said to her when first she had been allowed to have luncheon and dinner in the Dining Room. “There is nothing more boring than a woman, however pretty she is, who has nothing to say and does not give the right sort of sympathetic attention when people talk to her.”
    “And what is the right sort?” Azalea had asked. She had not been very old at the time.
    “It is right to take a sincere interest in other people, their troubles, their difficulties, their joys and their sorrows,” her mother replied. “When you once begin to think of them as having the same feelings as yourself, you will find yourself automatically making friends. Friendship, Azalea, is when you share part of yourself with another person.”
    Azalea had never forgotten her mother’s words and although sometimes she found it hard to think of the more austere officers and their chattering, gossip-loving wives as like herself, she did try to give them her sympathy and listen to what they had to say.
    She remembered her father once speaking angrily and rather scathingly about the wife of an officer who was making trouble for the other wives.
    “She is a spiteful woman and if she has a heart, no one has yet found it!”
    “I am sorry for her,” Azalea’s mother had said softly.
    “Sorry for her?” Derek Osmund exclaimed in surprise, “but why?”
    “Because she must be so unhappy,” his wife replied. “If she has nothing to give to the world except criticism and malice, think what she must be like inside and what she has to suffer from herself when she is alone.”
    Azalea remembered that her father, after looking at her mother incredulously for a moment, had then put his arms around her.
    “You would find