Surrender to Sin Read Free Page A

my Lord Dulwich? The Misses Brandon? I think not.”
    As Mr. Eldridge watched in dismay, his lordship seized the book and proceeded to cross out the Misses Brandon in order to insert his own name at the top of the page. “I shall make all my friends aware of the staff’s impertinence,” said Dulwich, jerking on his gloves, “and I predict that Hatchard’s will be out of business in a month’s time!”
    He paused, as though waiting for Mr. Eldridge to seek to detain him, and then Abigail heard the doorbell ring as his lordship left the shop. A moment or two passed before she felt safe enough to lift her head. Mr. Wayborn was leaning across the counter looking down at her. “You can come out now, monkey,” he said lightly. “The nasty man has gone away.”
    Abigail climbed to her feet. “I daresay you think me rather childish,” she stammered, “but I simply can’t bear scenes. It would have been so very embarrassing to see him.”
    Cary took her hand and led her around the counter. “I think you did exactly right,” he said. “I only wish I had the courage to run and hide whenever I see the old Pudding-face.”
    “I wasn’t hiding,” she said defensively. “I–I dropped my gloves.”
    “My dear infant, you’re wearing them.”
    “No, not these—the gloves I just bought.” She had the little box wrapped in brown paper to back up her story. “And then, of course, I thought it might look a little odd if I were to suddenly appear from behind the sales counter…so I rather thought I’d better stay where I was.”
    “I see,” he said, not believing a word of it. Gravely, he held Lord Dulwich’s written apology out to her. “His lordship wanted you to have this.”
    Abigail shyly plucked it from between his gloved fingers. “Did he actually write all those things you told him to?” she exclaimed. “How could he be sure I wouldn’t expose him?”
    He laughed. “Because you’re my cousin, that’s why. You’re a Wayborn.”
    He looked at her very warmly. To cover her embarrassment, she quickly turned to the clerk. “You will put the Misses Brandon back on the list for Kubla Khan , won’t you?”
    “Of course, madam,” the clerk assured her. “It was remiss of me not to tell his lordship that this is the sixth page of a very long list. I shall place the Misses Brandon at the bottom of page five.” As he wrote, he smiled politely at her. “Might I help you find something, madam?”
    “Please attend the gentleman first,” said Abigail. “I’m just waiting for my father.”
    “In that case, let me bring you something to look at while you wait,” said the clerk. “I won’t be a moment. I’ll have my assistant find your book for you, sir,” he told Cary. “I believe you were interested in Mr. Fielding’s History of a Foundling , popularly known as Tom Jones ?”
    “Who is this Kubla Khan?” Cary asked Abigail when the clerk had gone. “There must be two hundred names on that list.”
    “Do you not know the story, sir?” Abigail asked excitedly. “The poem first came to Mr. Coleridge in a dream. When he woke up, it just sort of poured out of him onto the page, as if the poet were merely a conduit between this world and the next.”
    Cary struggled to keep a straight face. “Fascinating technique,” he remarked.
    “Unfortunately, as he was putting it down on the page, he was interrupted by a man from Porlock, who would talk business, and when poor Mr. Coleridge sat down to write again, the rest of the poem had passed away like the images on the surface of the stream into which a stone has been cast. Why are you smirking?” she demanded.
    He was thinking that she was quite a pretty girl when she forgot to be shy.
    “Was I smirking? I beg your pardon. But it should be rather obvious to anyone that Mr. Coleridge is simply too lazy to finish his work. He’s invented a rather feeble excuse, a fairy story, to help him sell a fragment. Is that not some excuse for smirking, if