From Hell to Heaven by Barbara Cartland

Author:Barbara Cartland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782138822
Publisher: PublishDrive
Published: 2016-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Kistna was laughing at something Peregrine had said as the three of them rode back through the Park towards the Abbey.

It was nearly luncheon time and Kistna had begun to feel hungry even though she disliked knowing that their ride had come to an end.

It was a joy that was inexpressible to know that every morning she could ride the Marquis’s magnificent horses. And with him.

Today they had gone further than usual and had raced each other on a flat stretch of land that was over a mile long.

It was inevitable that the Marquis should win, but Kistna managed to beat Peregrine by a short head and he congratulated her.

“Who would have thought that that miserable girl who looked like a lamppost,” he said teasingly, “and had ridden nothing better than an Indian donkey should dare to prove herself an Amazon and beat me?”

Kistna had laughed.

“I am delighted I have been able to do so and as it happens I never rode a donkey in India!”

“Then it was either an elephant or a camel,” Peregrine retorted, “but certainly nothing as swift as what Linden produces from his stable.”

“There I agree with you,” Kistna said. “They are the most marvellous horses one could imagine and if I was an Amazon I would steal one and gallop away.”

“Where would you go?” Peregrine asked.

Kistna had been speaking lightly, trying as she always did to out-do Peregrine in repartee.

Now suddenly serious, she glanced at the Marquis and beneath her breath she murmured,

“Nowhere!”

Peregrine followed the direction of her eyes and like Mrs. Dawes he realised at once what had happened and wondered what he should do about it.

He thought that Kistna had suffered enough already to last her a lifetime and it would be cruel to have her break her heart as so many other women had done over the Marquis.

Peregrine better than anybody else was aware that no woman, however attractive, had ever held his attention for long.

He had the feeling, which he had never expressed before even to himself, that the Marquis was searching for some ideal, some mythical woman he would never find.

As they rode on with Kistna edging her horse a little nearer to the Marquis’s, Peregrine was wondering if he should warn her.

Then he thought that it would be useless.

Love, he told himself with uncharacteristic seriousness, was something that one could not prevent or control. It happened and, when it did, there was little one could do about it.

‘She is young, she will soon get over it,’ he tried to think.

But he found it was difficult to imagine Kistna with Branscombe.

He had not been with her every day and nearly every hour for the past ten days without realising not only was she, as he had thought at first, quick-witted, but there were also depths to her character that he had certainly not found in any other young woman of the same age.

‘It is because she has lived abroad,’ he thought, but knew that it was more than that

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