Ariante finally dressed after turning all the maids green and headed to the dining room. But even the breakfast table was not peaceful.
“I told you I don’t like mushrooms. Take it away!”
She had a habit of pushing away four out of five dishes the cook prepared. If she was in the worst mood after a long fight with the maids over dressing, she would even throw food around with her fork.
“I’m not eating!”
Her small hand pushed the soup bowl, and it shattered with a crash! Ariante grabbed a single piece of bread from the basket and started to run off somewhere.
“Your Highness!”
Mayana hurriedly ran after Ariante, glancing back. The head butler Kosha and the cook were glaring at Ariante’s retreating figure, grumbling complaints.
Was that all? After breakfast, the tutor came to teach Ariante, but that was never an easy task either.
Ariante rarely waited quietly for the tutor. The servants had to look all over the vast duke’s residence for her, taking cues from the angry tutor.
But the duke’s residence was too vast, and to borrow a phrase from head butler Kosha, Ariante was a ‘tinglingly wicked’ child.
Ariante would never hide in the same place twice if she had been found once. In places where ordinary children might hide, not a single hair of Ariante could be found.
She did wonder if she should use the term ‘wicked’ for something of this degree, but she felt a sense of selfpity every time she screamed and ran around looking for Ariante.
Or there were times like this.
“Oh my, Your Highness. Today, you truly show a posture worthy of your noble name. If you can sit so ladylike, why have you been acting this way?”
Seeing Ariante waiting for the first time, the teacher praised her, launching into a sermon of lectures and parables. She talked nonstop for a full hour!
“……So you must always be careful and pay attention so as not to tarnish the shining name of the Valterminster family. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Teacher. I’ll do that from now on. But can I ask you something?”
“What is it?”
“Could you open your bag?”
The teacher looked down at her bag on the chair in confusion. It was a bag containing books for teaching Ariante and her cherished knickknacks.
“This bag is suddenly why…… Ah!”
As soon as the cherryshaped lock opened, a spotted frog as big as an ordinary adult’s palm leaped out.
The teacher, alarmed, stumbled backward and fell flat on the floor, and Ariante, who saw it, laughed so hard she almost couldn’t breathe and ran away joyfully.
The teacher stopped teaching Ariante from that day on. In place of the absent Valterminster Duke, he told the butler Jocelyn:
“That devilish girl will never enter society! With nothing in her head, she’ll just tarnish the family’s reputation! If I were the Duke, I’d dress her in a plain gown and send her to the monastery right now!”
It was hard for Mayana, who had only overheard the maids talking, to know the truth of the statement, but she did know one fact.
No one, not anyone among the many servants of the Duke’s house, liked Ariante.
Thus, Ariante spent almost the whole day causing trouble. Ripping several dresses a day was usual, as was tossing aside lace socks and stockings. Overturning snack plates or kicking a maid’s shin was also common.
And that’s not all. Throwing mud into housekeeper Kosha’s room, or leaving cake on the floor, was not even surprising. Running around the mansion wrapped in newly ordered curtains, making a mess, was also typical.
Finally, when noon had passed, a sigh involuntarily escaped from Mayana’s lips as she mended Ariante’s torn lace sleeve for the second time.
“What’s wrong with this little brat?”
Since the Pobec couple had no children, this was Mayana’s first time taking care of a noble’s child up close.
She couldn’t know how ordinary children from other families lived, but Ariante’s surroundings seemed to lack nothing.
Except for one thing, the absence of a mother.
Mayana thought:
‘Is it because her mother is not around… that she always looks so sullen? She’s seven now, but sometimes she seems like a child who doesn’t know what joy is.’
Valterminster Duke did not pay much attention to Ariante’s education. Rather, he often seemed not to know what to do.
It’s not that the Duke was indifferent to Ariante or hated the child.
On the contrary, he often brought wagonloads of gifts for his daughter when returning from the capital, and even when she made a mess and caused trouble, he never scolded her harshly.
But to Mayana’s eyes, Ariante did not follow her father very well.
While some children might understandably be upset about a missing mother, Ariante’s complete silence about her unknown mother puzzled Mayana even more.
‘If only I could know the reason why, it would be a relief.’
Mayana bit off a thin thread with her teeth and carefully examined the mended spot. It was perfect, so that one couldn’t tell where it had been torn.
“Now then….”
It was the moment she got up from the chair.
With a furious, thumping sound, a maid named Bainty, her face flushed with anger, appeared.
Male lead reborn without memories — but he still falls for her.
The person he finds displeasing in this life turns out to be his cherished wife-master in previous life…
Xie Zhi and Fang Xianxing who had known each other for less than three days through a blind date sat in the same car in front of the civil affairs bureau. They had a disagreement and failed to get married.
Xie Zhi immediately took out his phone, slid through his contacts, and randomly selected the next marriage candidate.
The woman snatched his phone and hung up. Looking at his phone wallpaper, she awkwardly changed the subject: “An ancient painting, eh? It looks pretty good, it’s just that the person in the painting looks a bit like me.”
When he heard this, he sarcastically mocked her for being so delusional, completely unaware that, the person in front of him was the reincarnation of Wen Ru, the famous prime minister of Yuan Shun whom he most admired…
The female CEO who doesn’t want to get married with a divorce agreement in hand × The male archaeological researcher who will only get married if he’s sure he can get divorced
