Unforgiven (The Horsemen Trilogy) Read Online Free Page B

experience again the extreme passions of the girl she had been. She had grown up since then. She was a different person.
He
was doubtless a different person. She must forget about him, as far as that was possible when he was going to be living within a few miles of Penwith. Would he stay long? she wondered. It did not matter. She had her own life to live and it was about to be yet another new life, one that would bring her further respectability. And fulfillment. She thought deliberately about the children she could now hope for.
    She climbed out of the hollow and looked cautiously about her, but of course there was no one in sight. Only then did she wonder why he had come here to the hollow instead of riding on past. He could not have seen her from the road. Why had he stopped here? And why had she chosen today of all days to come here herself? She could not remember the last time she had been here. It was a horribly unfortunate coincidence. Or perhaps not so unfortunate. Perhaps if she had merely heard of his having come, she would have dreaded seeing him for the first time. That ordeal was over now at least.
    She set off homeward, walking briskly. She should not have sat for so long when it was December, no matter how pleasant the day. She felt so very cold.
    *   *   *
    THE people of Tawmouth and its surrounding properties had not been so blessed with exciting events in many a long year. One could not count the passing of poor Sir Basil Hayes fourteen months before as an exciting event, after all, Miss Pitt told the Reverend and Mrs. Finley-Evans in hushed and pious tones when she took tea with them and Mrs. Meeson and Mrs. and Miss Penallen.
    No sooner had everyone recovered from the news that the Earl of Haverford had arrived at Dunbarton Hall so unexpectedly that Mrs. Whiteman, his lordship’s housekeeper, had scarcely had a day’s notice of it herself, than word followed that his lordship’s mother, the Countess of Haverford, was expected for Christmasas well as a whole host of houseguests. Mothers with marriageable daughters began to dream of eligible male guests. Mothers with marriageable sons did the like for female guests.
    The gentlemen began to call upon his lordship. The ladies waited in breathless anticipation for him to return the calls. After all, as Mrs. Trevellas commented to Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Finley-Evans, one could get little satisfaction from one’s menfolk. All
they
had come back from Dunbarton with was word that his lordship had indeed fought at Waterloo and that he had seen the Duke of Wellington with his own eyes. As if
that
could be considered interesting news, though it was said that his grace was a fine figure of a man.
    “Nothing,” she concluded, having worked herself into a passion of indignation, “about how his lordship
looks
. Or about how he
dresses
. Mr. Trevellas, if you please, could not even remember what his lordship wore even though he conversed with him for all of half an hour.”
    The other ladies shook their heads in sympathetic disbelief.
    When the gentlemen were not discussing what each of them had learned about the earl’s war experiences and the ladies were not wondering if he was as handsome now as he had been as a boy, all of them were speculating on what Christmas might have in store for them by way of entertainment. With the old earl there had always been the tradition of the Christmas ball at Dunbarton.
    “And with the earl before him,” Miss Pitt added. She was one of the few among them who could remember the present earl’s grandfather. “He was a handsome man too,” she added with a sigh.
    “And perhaps there will be some Christmas entertainment at Penwith, too, this year,” Mrs. Meeson said when she took tea with Mrs. Trevellas, “with Sir Edwin Baillie expected daily.”
    Sir Edwin Baillie had slipped down on the roster of exciting events anticipated in Tawmouth, though he had headed the list before the earl’s sudden appearance. But his