The Quiet Heart Read Online Free Page B

in size was a mere slip of a room by comparison with even the smallest guest-room.
    While assisting Mrs. Davenport to make up the bed—with her own well-aired sheets— Alison hoped the autocratic Charles Leydon (who obviously had no mean ideas about his own importance) would not consider it necessary to raise an objection about the very size of the room, which would ensure the maximum amount of comfort for himself. If he had some idea of spending his first night at Leydon—the home of his ancestors for so many generations—in a room as vast as a throne-room, and with a bed actually raised high on a dais and approached by a flight of steps, while a fire blazed throughout the night on the far-away hearth, he was in for a disappointment.
    A disappointment that hardly troubled her as she laboured until she actually felt sick with exhaustion, and Mrs. Davenport insisted on breaking off operations to make them both a cup of tea.
    The tea revived them magically, and they went on until it was pitch dark, and a large number of lights were blazing throughout the house.
    Marianne returned from her visit to the hairdresser looking ten times more alluring than when she set out, and within a few minutes of her return the bath taps were running in her stepmother’s apartment. Marianne’s social occasions always involved a lot of borrowing from her sisters—and frequently from Alison—and to-night was no exception. Although Jessamy was occupied with her flower arrangements, and Alison and Mrs. Davenport were still toiling in the main house, Marianne, in a bath robe, raced backwards and forwards along stone corridors and up mysterious short flights of stairs to achieve her objective.
    From Alison she won permission to use an as yet unopened bottle of perfume, as well as borrow her best pair of sheer stockings; and from Jessamy she won a grudging assent to borrow a pair of pearl ear-clips. As Lorne was still in Murchester she had no need to ask permission there, and rifled her room until she found an unopened box of lace-edged handkerchiefs, one of which she filched. She was about to close the drawer when she noticed a small gold-mesh handbag, which was Lorne’s fifteenth birthday present from her father, just before he died, and without the smallest shred of conscience she decided she could make use of that, too.
    Then she raced back to her room, finished her dressing and emerged looking like a twentieth-century Cinderella whose slacks and sweater were thrust in the back of her wardrobe, and happily forgotten for that one night, at least.
    It was the main staircase of Leydon Hall that she descended when she was finally ready, and not one of the fine ladies in the portraits lining the gallery above her and the walls of the vast hall below her had ever looked more captivatingly sure of herself or more confident that this was her rightful setting. While Alison organised the activities of her helpers in the kitchen and rushed from newly lit stove to huge electric cooker to make certain her specially thought out menu was not likely to be ruined, and had no other thought in her head but the success of the nerve-shattering evening ahead of her, Marianne, in a wild silk dress of creamy pink worn beneath a velvet coat with a touch of mink on the collar—Alison had once possessed a short mink jacket which had been cut up to adorn various portions of her stepdaughters’ anatomies—smelling delightfully of Alison’s perfume, paused for a half second on each tread of the stairs as she made her way down to the hall.
    Golden and gleaming and beautiful, and entirely satisfied with herself, she paused for rather longer near the foot of the stairs to cast an appreciative glance around the hall and listen for the arrival of her escort, whose car could usually be heard roaring up the drive long before he was anywhere near the front of the house. He was a young veterinary surgeon by the name of Robert Marquis, and he was merely the latest incumbent,