The Glittering Lights (Bantam Series No. 12) Read Online Free

standstill.
    Sir James had travelled South to attend the funeral and he had not suggested that Cassandra should come with him.
    Anyway she also was in mourning, and she was well aware it would not be right for her to meet her future husband at the deathbed of his father.
    And so her second summer was spent in Yorkshire, while Sir James, she knew, waited at first confidently and then with some degree of anxiety for a letter from the new Duke of Alchester.
    Cassandra waited too and for the first time in her life, she had not confided her thoughts and feelings to her father.
    They were so close that she never had any secrets that he could not share.
    “Who offered for you tonight?” he would ask as they travelled back from a Ball at which Cassandra had undoubtedly been the Belle and evoked the admiration of every male and the envy of every female.
    “John Huntley, for the nine hundred and ninety-ninth time,” she replied laughingly. “I am fond of him, but he does not seem to understand that the word ‘No’ exists in the English language.”
    “I admire his persistence,” Sir James said.
    “He is as heavy-handed as a suitor as he is with a horse,” Cassandra had said.
    “And what could be more condemning?” Sir James remarked with a smile.
    “I know one thing ... I could never marry a man who could not ride well and did not understand horses.”
    “There are plenty of good riders to be found,” Sir James said mockingly.
    “You know I also want someone intelligent,” Cassandra said, “and that is more than I can say for Walter Witley. If you had heard him stammering and hesitating tonight, you would have been really sorry for him. I tried to prevent him coming to the point, but he had made up his mind to ‘try his luck,’ as he put it. But I do not think he will try again.”
    “Were you unkind to him?” Sir James asked curiously.
    “No, but I have deflated his ego,” Cassandra answered. “He thinks Lord Witley of Witley Park is too much of a catch to be turned down by the daughter of a mere Baronet!”
    “Damn it all!” Sir James ejaculated. “The Sherburns were Squires in Yorkshire when the Witleys were nothing but sheep-shearers.”
    Cassandra had laughed.
    “Oh, Papa, I love you when you are proud of your ancestry and you give the parvenus a set-down! But Lord Witley is Lord Witley and he never lets anyone forget it.”
    “Well, I will tell your mother to delete him from her list of eligible young men “ Sir James said, “and quite frankly, if you married a Witley, I should refuse to come to your wedding.”
    Cassandra laughed again and then linking her arm in her father’s she said:
    “The trouble is, Papa, that I find you so fascinating, so amusing, so clever, and so unusually intelligent, that all other men pale into insignificance beside you.”
    Sir James kissed the top of her head.
    “You spoil me, Cassandra. At the same time, as you well know, I want the best—the very best—for you, and that is what I intend you to have.”
    It was now that the Duke’s belated letter had arrived, that Cassandra found herself for the first time questioning her father’s wisdom where she was concerned.
    She knew that, had the Marquis of Charlbury come to stay as had been arranged the previous year, she would have accepted his proposal as her father intended, and by now they would have been married.
    ‘But,’ she told herself, ‘in the past year I have changed.’
    She was not a very young girl standing on the threshold of life, a little bewildered and uncertain of herself, and unsure of what she wanted of the future.
    In simple words she had grown up.
    At twenty she was no longer a debutante , and because she was far more intelligent than the average girl of her age, or indeed of most women at any age, she was prepared to look critically at her suitor and not accept him just because it pleased her father.
    Sir James was perceptive enough to know that something was perturbing her, and while he