Lights, Laughter and a Lady. Barbara Cartland

All alone and penniless after the unexpected death of her much-loved father, the lovely but innocent Minella Clinton-Wood is desperate. But who can she turn to? Her Aunt Esther has made her reluctance clear, describing the idea of Minella living with her as 'a burden'. But then she finds a letter to her father from her slightly older friend, Connie, the local Parson's attractive daughter, thanking him for some mysterious kindness. "Someday perhaps I will be able to do something for you," Connie has written to him. Maybe, Minella thinks, Connie can help her. Arriving in London, she discovers that her friend is one of the famous Gaiety Theatre's exotic and flamboyant Gaiety Girls. And Connie immediately begs the demurely beautiful Minella to stand in for one of them who is ill at an exclusive party, which is given by the dashingly raffish and handsome Earl of Wynterborne at his sublimely impressive country home, Wyn Castle. Naively Minella agrees to the subterfuge – and soon finds herself dressed up to the nines in a decadent Social world beyond her experience as she has been brought up quietly in the country. Doubling the deception after the party is over, the Earl asks her to travel with him to Egypt, pretending to be the wife who had once betrayed and left him for another man. So Minella embarks on a voyage of discovery, deception and perhaps love.