Marjorie Farrel Read Free Page B

Robin was on the continent. Now that Robin had returned, he had resumed his habit of treating the Stanleys as his second family.
    Although Dev was only a few years older than Barbara, he teased her like the younger sister he considered her to be. Barbara, however, was afraid she was more than a little in love with him. She had tried to talk herself out of it, for he was hardly the serious partner she and Judith had fantasized. He was charming, boyish, and apparently frivolous, although she knew that he was also a responsible landlord and loving son.
    She had no illusions that he looked for more in a woman than any other male of her acquaintance. He would more likely amuse himself with the demimonde before he settled down with some seventeen-year-old, fresh from her first Season. Barbara was sure that he had no knowledge of what she disparaged as her “schoolgirl infatuation”: in fact, he seemed blissfully unaware of her as a woman at all, and had, over the years, come to her for sisterly advice regarding his affairs of the heart.
    “Are you doing something special today? Or did you come to breakfast early just to watch the eggs get cold?”
    Barbara was jolted out of her daydreaming, and blushed as she realized that Robin was repeating his question for the third time.
    “Do you remember Judith Ware, my good friend from Mrs. Hastings’? She visited us one summer, and the last Christmas you and Simon came home on leave together. It was the year of the big snowstorm, and we were all housebound. Remember you and Simon taught us to waltz?”
    “Yes, that nice little wren-like girl? I thought you told me she left school to work as a governess?”
    “She did, after her father died. But she has a brother who is now in London studying law. He sent for her, and I met her by chance at Hatchards and invited her to spend the day with me.”
    “So you have been reunited with an old friend, and I fear I have lost one,” replied Robin.
    “Simon?”
    “Yes. He has been in London for almost a month now and will not admit anyone. I have tried for weeks, Barbara, and he just sends his butler back with apologies that he is not in to visitors. He seems to be living in the expectation that his sight will return.”
    “But I thought the surgeons told him he was permanently blind?”
    “Yes and no. There was no damage to his eyes, Francis told me. They speculate that the head injury irreparably damaged whatever part of the eye conveys images to the mind, but since they cannot see the injury, there was initially room for hope. Simon is holding on to that for all he is worth. But he sits all day in the library, looking at nothing. He is eating little and has lost almost a stone since he came home, according to Francis. I am worried about him, and don’t know what to do. I can’t very well force my way in and drag him out.”
    Barbara placed her hand on Robin’s arm. “Do not give up, Robin, keep going back. Even if he refuses to see you now, you may eventually wear him down. And he has to be taking it in, on some level, the fact that you have not given up on him.”
    “I hope so, Barbara, I hope so. Well, I must be off. I will see you later.”
    Barbara sat over her last cup of tea until it grew cold, lost in thought. Of all her brother’s friends, Simon, Duke of Sutton, was the one she felt closest to. He was the son of an old friend of their father’s, and they had seen him many times over the years, on his visits to Ashurst. She had many memories of the three of them picking raspberries or racing their ponies. She had been allowed to tag along after her older brother and his friend, and they tolerated her as long as she didn’t become missish.
     “Missish” meant being unwilling to bait their hooks for them, so Barbara had learned to close her eyes and quickly press fat, wriggling worms against the needle-sharp hook, sometimes impaling her thumb in the process, but never crying out. “Missish” meant worrying about her