In her memory, Lou was strikingly beautiful, but always pale and sickly, excessively quiet, and composed about everything.

Lou simply listened in silence to Julia’s thoughtless chatter, or was just quietly present beside her.

The relationship was terribly one-sided, and looking back now with the passage of years, she felt a guilt creeping in: could her needlessly energetic, uninhibited approach have been a great burden to the frail Lou?

There was reason to think so. Lou never once came to find Julia first.

It was always Julia who ran across the rear garden and the fields beyond it to the open-air hot spring grounds and latched on.

Perhaps Lou simply used the departure from Pearl Springs as a natural opportunity to put some distance between them, after Julia had been too forward.

She sent letters to the Klaus duchy afterward, but received no reply.

After inquiring through connections and acquaintances, the only response that came back was a cold one: no such person exists.

Like someone who never existed in the first place.

Only the silver hair and violet eyes, characteristic of the Klaus duchy, were the same in Lou, so she could only guess Lou was a close relative or from the collateral line.

Perhaps Lou was someone the family preferred not to reveal.

It was something she only came to understand now, older and with time behind her, but if someone were an illegitimate child or tied to a family’s disgrace, they would never be disclosed to the outside world, and no one would want it known.

‘Let it be. Unless we happen to cross paths by chance, like something out of a novel or a play….’

After telling herself this many times over, Julia hugged the hollow ache in her chest and let exhaustion pull her toward sleep for the day ahead.

***

“You’re boring, Lady Julia. The more I look at you, the more plain and dull and charmless you are, like a wildflower grown in the shade.”

Diligent, earnest, the model of a lady.

That was the reputation the world attached to Julia, but her fiancé Henry mocked it openly.

“Oh, my dear fiancée? Buried in books again today? Ha!”

Henry’s loud laughter was often a discordant noise that shattered the quiet of the manor.

“Honestly, I’m curious. Just how lacking must you be in natural refinement to have not a single day’s rest? There’s a saying that diligence is the only way to compensate for what you’re born without. Fits perfectly.”

By now Henry finished at the Schola and came home in his Academy uniform, and he never came alone.

A crowd of hangers-on trailed after him like fish droppings, drawn to his love of noise and spectacle.

Mostly male students from the same Academy or gaudily dressed female students, but he also brought along young men of unknown origin.

Their numbers ranged from four or five at the low end to nearly ten at the high, turning the refined and stately interior of the manor into a noisy marketplace.

“So dedicated! I’m in awe, my dear fiancée!”

Henry sneered mockingly, and a high-pitched female voice beside him chimed in with a drawl.

“My, I get by just fine without studying that hard! How desperate must she be to go to those lengths.”

“Right. I don’t even understand it. Maybe she’s just carrying it around to show off.”

Whenever Julia walked down the corridor with an advanced domain management textbook in hand, Henry would smirk and toss out a remark, and the girl beside him, showing off her narrow waist and full chest in her uniform, would send lazy jeers his way.

“They say if your head isn’t sharp, your body suffers for it. That must be heavy.”

A girl with murky, algae-green eyes threw a provocative look.

“Instead of spending time on dull knowledge, why not work on your appearance? Plain is practically an insult to a lady, isn’t it?”

Tossed out like a murmur to herself, or perhaps meant to be heard.

“If there’s no progress to show for it anyway, grooming your looks has better odds, doesn’t it? At least makeup is visible. Nobody knows what’s going on inside someone’s head.”

Julia brushed off the stream of remarks without effort.

The knowledge she was acquiring was on a professional level incomparable to the basic general education taught at the Academy, but pointing that out one by one would only waste her breath.

She was completely worn out from being ground through the Rodev family’s wheel day after day, and she was simply tired.

“Hey, Henry. I’m bored. Want to go somewhere quiet and do something fun?”

The girl with the murky green eyes flashed them and draped herself openly over Henry’s arm, as though making sure Julia heard, and whispered.

Her full chest, wrapped in her uniform, pressed deep against his arm.

“Let’s make each other feel good? Hmm? It’s been a while since we did anything. I heard you’ve been chasing after girls from other schools lately.”

“Who said that? Same as always, they’re the ones who like me.”

“Fair enough, Henry is popular. So in that spirit, play with me today too?”

Any other time he would have gone off to find an empty guest room or a bedroom, but today Henry shook his head, unexpectedly.

“Nah, can’t. I’ll get an earful if my parents catch me.”

“Pfft. Henry’s changed! No fun!”

“Come on, calm down. I did get engaged, you know. I’d rather not get thrown out of this house, so bear with me.”

“As if they’d throw out their only son! You can do whatever you want, can’t you?”

“Well, still…. My parents are home, so I should at least be mindful, right?”

Saying that, Henry leaned in and whispered something in the girl’s ear.

The two of them burst into giggles over something, laughing together.

Through all that noise, Julia ignored them cleanly, as she always did.

They were the sort who stuck to their own kind.

And since they attended the Academy, Julia, who would be going to Saint Rose’s School for Girls, believed she would have no connection to that sort of crowd at the Academy for the rest of her life.

“Well then, keep at it, my dear fiancée.”

“…….”

The childish mockery fading behind her and the sound of gleeful laughter did not have many more days left.

Thinking that, a stillness like a calm lake settled inside her.

Once she finished her refinement training and entered the girls’ school dormitory, the future ahead would be bright and smooth.

Tired, drifting through the manor like a ghost, Julia fixed her unfocused gaze ahead and made her way to the study room where the demanding tutors waited.

***

Was it because she was too certain of an optimistic future?

Or because she placed too much faith in the sweet hope of Saint Rose’s School for Girls dangled before her?

One day, just a year before she was set to enter a formal institution, Julia received news like a bolt from the blue.

“…Pardon?”

The blank sound escaped her before she could stop it.

She wondered if she heard wrong.

“Julia, we know how hard you worked and how much effort you put in all this time. However, the tutors for each subject have conveyed that one year is far too little time to complete all remaining instruction.”

Marquis and Marchioness Rodev, whom she faced formally for the first time in a while, wore stiff expressions.

They were not asking her to continue visiting as before. They required her to move into Rodev manor entirely and complete her bridal training there.

“Saint Rose’s School for Girls is fully residential. Once you enroll, the education will inevitably be interrupted for three years, so we want everything completed before then. Right after you graduate from the girls’ school comes the wedding.”

Marchioness Rodev let out a calculating sigh, and the marquis gave a dignified nod.

“We acknowledge that you are already a great help to our family. But there are still many areas that fall short, and you know that yourself, don’t you?”

“…Yes.”

Julia lowered her head quietly.

As always, she had no say in the matter.

It was simply an order dressed as a gentle suggestion.

And so the life of being confined entirely to an assigned bedroom in the manor began.

Fortunately, Vincent and her parents were getting on well at the Wilroy townhouse, where Vincent recovered his health, and this year Vincent enrolled at the Schola, so there was comfort in knowing she would not see him often enough to feel the separation.

If things were otherwise, she would have suffered over being apart from him.

The one and only relief in this bleak situation was that, by insisting on her status as a fiancée and not yet a wife, she was assigned a guest room in the annex rather than the inner quarters where the family lived.

She knew well that Henry’s noisy entourage came and went frequently through his room in the inner quarters, and she had absolutely no desire to cross paths with them, even by accident.

“You can stay in this room. Though the inner quarters of the main house would be more comfortable.”

“The annex is quieter than the inner quarters, and I think I’ll be able to concentrate better.”

True to a noble family of high standing, the guest room in the marquisate was furnished beautifully.

Elegant, high-quality furniture, decorations beautiful enough to sting the eyes, and bedding as soft as clouds more than made up for the toll of each day’s grueling instruction on her weary body and spirit.