Love and The Marquis. Barbara Cartland

remembered the hours when she used to sit watching him work and supervising the bricklayers, then the carpenters and the glaziers, checking everything they did with his plans.

      It suddenly struck her that the Marquis of Marizon lived not very far away.

      She had never met him because her father had once said that he was a very serious young man who did not approve either of him or, as he described it, of the ‘goings on of the King’.

      Imeldra had been too young at the time to understand what her father had meant by that.

      She was quite certain, however, that the Marquis must be a bore if he did not approve of her father and therefore dismissed him from her mind,

      Now she thought perhaps she had missed something not as regards the Marquis but in not seeing Marizon.

      She was well aware that it was reputed to be one of the finest houses in the country and often there were references in the newspapers and magazines to the pictures in the Gallery at Marizon and the furniture and silver.

      ‘I ought to have persuaded Papa to invite the Marquis here,’ she thought now.

      She then remembered with a little pang of her heart that, when her father married Lady Bullington, she would be the hostess at Kingsclere and not herself.

      It was then for the first time that it swept over her what it would mean to have her father married and a woman in the place of her mother. And the realisation made her angry.

      ‘How dare any woman aspire to being Papa’s wife?’ she asked herself and knew that a good number of women had done just that, but had then failed in their aspirations while Lady Bullington had succeeded.

      The anger that now seemed to invade her whole body made her feel suddenly defiant and rebellious.

      Because she loved her father so deeply, she had agreed to everything that he had said last night, in fact agreeing with him without making any protest.

      Now she thought that it was intolerable, first that he should leave her, secondly that she should have to go to her grandmother’s and thirdly that in the future her place in her father’s life would be taken over by his wife who would then by right have priority in everything that concerned her home.

      “I cannot bear it!” she almost screamed aloud.

      Then, as she looked down at the newspaper that lay on the table, a daring plan came into her mind.

      It took her a minute or two to think it out and, when she had done so, there was a light in her eyes that her father would have recognised and understood.

      She lifted her chin in a way that, although she did not realise it, was a clear imitation of him.

      ‘I will do it!’ she said to herself. ‘It will be quite easy as there is nobody to stop me.’