shall miss you – Papa.”
“As I shall miss you.”
The Duke walked up the stairs with his arm round her shoulders.
When they reached her bedroom door, he kissed her affectionately.
As he went down the passage to his own room, the Duke was mulling over in his mind the young gentlemen whom he had seen recently at Court.
It was not going to be easy to choose one who seemed to be suitable as a husband for his beautiful daughter.
There always seemed to be some flaw somewhere, which told him instinctively that they would be unfaithful within twelve months of the Wedding Ceremony.
‘I will find somebody,’ he thought confidently as he climbed into his comfortable bed.
*
Aletha, having undressed, then pulled back the curtains in her bedroom and was looking out of the window.
There was a full moon and a multitude of stars filled the sky.
It was still cold at nights, but the moonlight on the lake glimmered like silver.
The daffodils were just beginning to make a carpet of gold beneath the old oak trees.
Usually Aletha was very moved by the glorious beauty of her home and everything about it.
Tonight, however, she was looking out with unseeing eyes.
She was thinking of leaving everything that she loved and that was familiar and of going away with a strange man to a strange house.
There would be strange servants instead of those who had known her since she was born.
There would be strange relatives who would doubtless disapprove of many of the things she did.
Perhaps the man she married would not ride as well as her father did, or for that matter, as well as she rode herself.
‘How can I possibly bear it?’ she asked the stars. ‘And yet I want love, the love that will make everything – even a cottage seem – wonderful because – he is there.’
She found herself thinking again of the Empress Elizabeth.
Because of the beauty, so many men loved her and, if all the gossip was really true, there were some she loved in return.
Aletha knew only too well that she wanted something very different for herself.
She wanted marriage in which the outside world did not matter in the least.
A marriage where the only thing that counted was her love for her husband and his love for her.
She gazed again at the moon.
‘Am I asking the impossible?’ she enquired. ‘Must I really be content with second best?’
She knew that hoped-for love after marriage could never be the same as marrying the man of her dreams.
Would horses, however magnificent, however swift and however exciting be the same as love?
She wished that this topic of conversation had not arisen the night before her father was to leave for Denmark.
She so wanted to go on talking to him.
She wanted to try to make him fully understand that, while she was may be asking for the impossible, she must nevertheless strive to attain it.
She suddenly had a terrifying feeling.
Suppose, almost before she could realise what was happening, she found herself the wife of some odd man with whom she had very little if anything in common?
“I cannot bear it!” she called out aloud in the darkness of her room.
She thought that, if this should happen to her, she would run away.
Her father was going to Denmark.
Perhaps in Denmark he would find her a husband although it seemed very unlikely?
A foreigner, a man whose language was different and about whose national customs she knew nothing.
She felt a sudden panic sweep over her.
It was almost as if she had been out sailing on a smooth sea which had suddenly become tempestuous.
‘I must escape!’ she thought.
Then she told herself that she must be sensible, talk to her father and explain to him how she felt about his ideas for her.
Because he loved her he would surely understand.
She had an impulse to run to his room to tell him now what she was feeling.
She wanted to know that he understood, as he had understood when as a child she was frightened of the dark.
Then again she told herself that it would be a very selfish thing for her to do.
He had to leave very early in the morning to cross the North Sea to Denmark.
‘Why does he have to go now at this moment?’ she asked herself angrily.
Instead they could have been setting off together from Tilbury to Ostend and travelling from there by train to Budapest.
Together they could have inspected the Hungarian horses that he was so determined to buy.
They could have ridden side by side in the wild open country that was the joy and delight of the Empress Elizabeth.
‘If we were there, it would be far easier to talk to Papa about love,’ Aletha told herself.
But it was Mr. Heywood who was going to Hungary instead of her.
It would be he who would have all the fun of selecting the finest and best horses.
It was something she knew that she would enjoy more than anything she had ever done, especially if she could be with her father and talk to him about the good and bad points of each horse.
She could imagine how excited they would be at finding really superb animals that were exactly what they wanted.
It was exasperating to think that everything had gone wrong.
She turned from the window.
It was no use wishing for the moon.
She had to stay at home and worry about the future.
It was certainly something that she could not talk about to Cousin Jane.
Impulsively she turned again to the window to look up once more at the stars.
‘Let me – find a man I will – love – and who will – love me,’ her heart cried out.
It
