Usually she liked to hear other people laugh. The way this one laughed, however....
It didn't sound the way others laughed.
She frowned at the grass they walked over, and then tilted her head up and looked at him as he tried to assure her that he was 'not a nice creature'... She almost believed him, too, except that she'd already seen how kind he'd been to her. There was no reason for him to have been so nice -- she was no one to him. But yet he'd calmed her down, talked with her, told her about the place where she was... Beauty was certain he was a better 'creature' than he thought himself to be.
And that was odd, wasn't it, that he called himself a creature. It seemed to Beauty that he perhaps had wronged someone in the past, and was still trying to make up for it. Whatever it had been, she imagined the story was terrible for him to tell. She wouldn't ask it of him.
And she told herself she wasn't curious about it, either.
"If that's true," she said, perhaps a little stubbornly, "Then I will be pleased to see you again so that it will not be too soon to place so much trust in you." She said it firmly, crisply. "And thank you for the invitation."
But when she turned away from him to look at the place where they were walking, the triumphant lift of her chin was soon negated by the fact that her jaw dropped -- and stayed there.
In front of them, very near them now, was the cottage she'd seen from the distance. It was as she'd imagined - everything she ever would have imagined a perfect cottage to be. Thatched roof. Fresh white painted steps and green-painted shutters. A vegetable garden on one side of the wall and a rose garden on the other...
And her name, engraved in beautiful script, on a silver plate beside the door.