The Temptation of Torilla Read Free

there was a note in his voice that was very different from the way in which he spoke of his future bride.
    In February, before she had come to Harrogate, several Hungarian horses had been brought to The Castle, and to her delight she had caught an echo of the child who had run eagerly to draw her by the hand down to the stables when he had a new pony.
    “Is Lady Beryl a good rider?” she asked now.
    “She looks well on a horse,” the Marquis answered, “and of course she will hunt with my own pack. That reminds me, I must do up the Hunting Lodge in Leicestershire.”
    He smiled somewhat mockingly as he added,
    “The bachelor parties I have given there have not improved the condition of the furnishings and I suspect that any woman would find it distressingly masculine.”
    “Your father and I had some very happy times there,” the Dowager Marchioness said wistfully.
    “As you had everywhere,” the Marquis answered. “And now, Mama, stop comparing me with Papa and yourself with Beryl.”
    He moved to take her hands once again into his as he said,
    “You know without me telling you there will never be another woman as sweet or as beautiful as you! So it is no use complaining if I have to accept second best.”
    “All I want, dearest, is your happiness,” the Dowager Marchioness murmured.
    “I have already told you I am content,” the Marquis replied.
    His mother thought as he spoke that there was a distinctly cynical note in his voice.
*
    Some miles away from the fashionable Harrogate resort with its Spa, its expensive hotels and its aristocratic visitors, but still in Yorkshire, was the village of Barrowfield.
    Near Leeds, it was a village of poorly built, dilapidated and dismal houses that always seemed to be covered with a fine veil of coal-dust.
    Outside the village and built on a hill rising above it was an ugly grey stone Church and beside it an equally ugly and unnecessarily large Vicarage.
    In the kitchen with its unwieldy, out-of-date stove and flagged floor, a servant with grey hair and the neat appearance of a children’s nurse was trying to instruct a thin, rather vacant-looking girl how to baste a leg of mutton.
    “Try to understand what I am saying, Ellen,” the older woman said sharply. “I’ve told you six times already to keep spooning the gravy over the meat, but you don’t seem to understand me.”
    “Oi’m doing what ya tells me,” the girl replied in a broad Yorkshire accent.
    “That’s a matter of opinion,” the older woman snapped.
    Then she turned her head as the kitchen door opened and a young voice cried,
    “Abby! Abby!”
    Abigail, for that was the woman’s full name, turned from the stove to look at the girl coming into the kitchen.
    With her fair hair and blue eyes she could have been described as being typically English in appearance if it had not been for the almost arresting loveliness of her face.
    Her eyes seemed almost too big for the oval of it, and, although they were blue, they were the deep blue of a Southern sea rather than a spring sky.
    People who looked closely at Torilla noticed the sweetness of her mouth, the lips softly curved and the faint smile that seemed to lift the corners almost like sunshine peeping through the leaves of a tree.
    “What is it, Miss Torilla?” Abby enquired.
    “A letter, Abby! A letter from Lady Beryl and – would you believe it? She is engaged to be married!”
    “And about time,” Abby said with the familiarity of an old servant. “Her Ladyship must be getting on for twenty-one and with all her success in London I expected her to be married long before this.”
    “Well, she is engaged now,” Torilla said, “and guess what Abby? She begs me to go and stay with her!”
    She looked down at the letter and read aloud –
    “You must be my Bridesmaid, Torilla. I intend to have only one so as not to provide myself with unnecessary competition.”
    Torilla stopped reading with a laugh,
    “As if there could be any competition