Lady Pamela by Clare Darcy

Author:Clare Darcy [Darcy, Clare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), Romance
ISBN: 9780451072825
Publisher: Signet
Published: 1975-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Eleven

Not having observed his entrance into the room, she had been taken completely unawares by his sudden appearance before her—a fact of which Carlin at once took unfair advantage by placing Lady St. Abbs' pelerine about her shoulders and leading her back to the canapé upon which the old Countess had indicated he was to sit.

“I think you will be quite comfortable here, Lady Pamela," he said, as he guided her still dazed and unresisting steps to this hideously uncomfortable article of furniture.

She sat down automatically and he placed himself beside her with a bland air of taking his position there so much for granted that Lord Babcoke, who was ordinarily quite uncritical of how much attention his betrothed received from other members of the male sex, and was even able to accept with equanimity the expression of hungry devotion with which that most ardent of her admirers, the Marques de Barrera, continued to regard her in spite of her engagement, decided to be jealous and sat down with rather unnecessary emphasis in a chair on her other side.

Lady St. Abbs was looking sharply at Lady Pamela. "Humph!" she said, managing to convey in this brief ejaculation a comprehensive suspicion of the human race. "I see you two have met before.”

Lady Pamela, who, as she had heard neither the butler's announcement of Lord Dalven nor the conversation between Carlin and Lady St. Abbs, had not the faintest notion under what name her reprehensible acquaintance had chosen to insinuate himself into the Countess's house, hastily said No, at the same moment that Carlin said Yes.

Carlin looked at her reproachfully. "Surely you haven't forgotten, Lady Pamela!" he said.

Lady Pamela, looking daggers at him, said she was sorry but she had, while Lady St. Abbs, with her black eyes now boring into them so penetratingly that it seemed quite possible they would go straight through them and make holes in the mahogany back of the canapé, remarked to Carlin that she had understood him to say he had just arrived in London.

“I have," he replied, perfectly unruffled. "My meeting with Lady Pamela took place elsewhere. But since it obviously made no impression upon her I shall not be so rude as to try to make her recall it.”

At that moment, to Lady Pamela's intense relief, a magnificently stout woman in a pomona-green gown strode masterfully into the room and took up a positionbeside the great carved-leg leather-cased pianoforte. A small, depressed-looking man came behind her to play her accompaniments, and together they launched furiously into a very long aria by Handel, in which the cantatrice shook out such astonishing clusters of notes upon every syllable that it seemed possible she might burst with the effort, like a music box wound up too tight, and spill out her springs all over the room.

Lady Pamela sat listening, or rather pretending to listen, for some minutes. Finally, feeling that she would go mad if she did not find out without another instant's delay under what guise Carlin had got into Lady St.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.