Bewitched (Bantam Series No. 16) Read Free Page B

said dryly.
    “Then do something about it,” Charles Collington said urgently.
    “What do you suggest?”
    “There must be something!”
    “There is,” the Marquis said slowly, but he did not, in spite of his friend’s curiosity, volunteer what that might be.
    The following afternoon Lady Walden, at her house near St. Albans in Hertfordshire, was surprised to receive a visitor.
    “Fabius!” she exclaimed in surprise when the Marquis was announced. “I thought you never came to the country once you had left it for the London Season.”
    “I wanted to see you,” the Marquis replied.
    “I am flattered,” Lady Walden smiled, “but as it happens I am leaving here tomorrow, for I do not intend to miss the Duchess of Devonshire’s Ball which takes place on Thursday.”
    “I was sure you would be there,” the Marquis said.
    “And yet you have come all this way to see me today. I am flattered, Fabius.”
    There was, however, surprise in her beautiful eyes as she looked at him.
    Eurydice Walden had been the toast of St. James ever since she emerged from the school-room six years earlier.
    She was lovely in the manner of the fashionable beauties of the time, with fair hair, blue eyes and an exquisitely curved body which left no-one in any doubt as to her femininity.
    She had been feted for her beauty when she had burst almost like a comet on the astonished Social World, but she was at the moment even more desirable because as her beauty had increased with the years so had her assets.
    She had married at seventeen the wild, attractive and immensely wealthy Sir Beaugrave Walden.
    He had, however, been killed in the last month of the war, leaving an immense fortune to his widow who, a year later on the death of her father, inherited together with other assets ten thousand acres of land which marched with the Marquis’s own Estate.
    Eurydice and the Marquis had known each other since they were children, and it had always been understood between their fathers that they should be married and their estates united.
    The Marquis, however, had been abroad with his Regiment in Portugal when Eurydice married, and although his father bewailed the fact, he himself had felt no particular loss.
    He sat down now on an elegant damask sofa in Eurydice’s Drawing-Room and regarded her with a scrutinising expression which she found somehow perplexing.
    “What is the matter, Fabius? You appear worried.”
    She was in fact puzzling her head as to why he should call on her so unexpectedly.
    She was glad that she was wearing one of her prettiest muslin gowns because, although she was not strongly interested personally in the man she had known ever since childhood, she was well aware that he was sought after by the majority of her female friends.
    To capture his interest would be a feather in her cap, for which she would undoubtedly be envied.
    “I want to talk to you, Eurydice.”
    “You said that before.”
    “I know, but I am not quite certain how to explain to you why I am here.”
    “It is unlike you to be so reticent,” Eurydice teased.
    “What I have come to say,” the Marquis went on in a serious tone, “is that I think we should do what was always expected of us by your father and by mine.”
    “What was that?” Eurydice enquired.
    There was a note of astonishment in her voice. She could hardly believe that the Marquis was in fact going to say, what she half suspected trembled on his lips.
    “I think we should get married!”
    “Are you serious?” Eurydice enquired.
    “Very serious,” he answered. “You know as well as I do that it was what our fathers planned since the moment you were born. They were close friends, and they both envisaged the day would come when our Estates would become one because you became my wife.”
    “But all that was years ago,” Eurydice objected, “and now they are both dead.”
    “But we are alive,” the Marquis said, “and I cannot help feeling it was an eminently sensible