One Night for Love Read Free Page B

saw only distant shadows in the darkness and no one noticed her approach.
    She climbed the marble steps—she counted eight of them—and stepped into a hall so brightly lighted and so vast that she felt suddenly dwarfed and quite robbed of breath and coherent thought. There were people everywhere, milling about in the hall, moving up and down the great staircases. They were all dressed in rich fabrics and sparkled with jewels and gems. Lily had foolishly expected to walk up to a closed door and knock on it, and he would answer it.
    She wished suddenly that she had allowed Captain Harris to write his letter and had awaited a reply. What she had done instead no longer seemed a wise course at all.
    Several liveried, white-wigged servants stood about on duty. One of them was hurrying toward her, she saw in some relief. She had been feeling invisible and conspicuous all at the same time.
    “Out of here immediately!” he commanded, keeping his voice low, attempting to move her back toward thedoors without actually pushing her. He was clearly trying not to draw attention to himself or to her. “If you have business here, I will direct you to the servants’ entrance. But I doubt you do, especially at this time of night.”
    “I wish to speak with the Earl of Kilbourne,” Lily said. She never thought of him by that name. She felt as if she were asking for a stranger.
    “Oh, do you now?” The servant looked at her with withering scorn. “If you have come here to beg, be off with you before I summon a constable.”
    “I wish to speak with the Earl of Kilbourne,” she said again, standing her ground.
    The servant set his white-gloved hands on her shoulders, obviously intending to move her backward by force after all. But another man had glided into place beside him, a man dressed all in black and white, though he did not have the same sort of splendor as other gentlemen who were in the hall and on the stairs. He must be a servant too, Lily guessed, though superior to the first one.
    “What is it, Jones?” he asked coldly. “Is she refusing to leave quietly?”
    “I wish to speak to the Earl of Kilbourne,” Lily told him.
    “You may leave of your own volition
now
,” the man in black told her with quiet emphasis, “or be taken up for vagrancy five minutes from now and thrown in jail. The choice is yours, woman. It makes no difference to me. Which is it to be?”
    Lily opened her mouth again and drew breath. She had come at the wrong time, of course. Some grand sort of entertainment was in progress. He would not thank her for appearing now. Indeed, he might not thank her for coming at all. Now that she had seen all this, she began to understand the impossibility of it all. But what else could she do? Where else could she go? She closed her mouth.
    “Well?” the superior servant asked.
    “Trouble, Forbes?” another, far more cultured voice asked, and Lily turned her head to see an older gentleman with silver hair and a lady in purple satin with matching plumed turban on his arm. The lady had a ring on each finger, worn over her glove.
    “Not at all, your grace,” the servant called Forbes answered with a deferential bow. “She is just a beggar woman who has had the impudence to wander in here. She will be gone in a moment.”
    “Well, give her sixpence,” the gentleman said, looking with a measure of kindness at Lily. “You will be able to buy bread for a couple of days with it, girl.”
    With a sinking heart Lily decided it was the wrong moment in which to stand her ground. She was so close to the end of her journey and yet seemingly as far away as ever. The servant in black was fishing in a pocket, probably for a sixpenny piece.
    “Thank you,” she said with quiet dignity, “but I did not come here for charity.”
    She turned even as the superior servant and the gentleman with the cultured voice spoke simultaneously and hurried from the hall, down the steps, along the terrace, and across a downward sloping