Bewitching Season Read Online Free PDF Page A

next.”
    “Then you aren’t too—how old are you, anyway?” He looked at her, head cocked to one side, the
    sun sparkling on his bright gold hair.
    “Thirteen this past May.”
    “That’s right. You and Pen were born the same day as Princess Victoria.” He squinted into the
    Folly. “I hear the wasps. Let’s walk in the shade.”
    So she had followed him to the edge of the lawn, strolling back toward the house in the shade of the
    trees, and listened to him talk about the books he was reading now before he entered Cambridge in
    the autumn.
    “I’m reading for pleasure all summer, because after Michaelmas I won’t be able to,” he confessed.
    They talked about the Waverley Novels, some of which she’d read, and Miss Burney and Miss
    Edgeworth, and Persy found herself promising to ask her father to let her read the Persian novels of
    Mr. Morier, if they could be found, and the American Mr. Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans .
    She stole quick looks at him as he enthusiastically suggested what books she should read next.
    What was making him so pleasant today? Why, his last visit at Easter had been when he took them
    riding through every brook, ditch, and puddle he could find. It had taken her and Pen days to sponge
    the mud out of their riding habits. She almost tiptoed at his side, waiting for him to somehow twist
    their conversation into some opportunity to tease. But he never did.
    As they approached the stairs up to the terrace, Lochinvar paused to gaze back out over the lawn
    toward Grandfather’s Folly. Persy shaded her eyes with her hand and looked hard at his face, to see if
    she could see what had changed him since that spring.
    It still looked like him—same thick blond hair and dark-lashed eyes. But—she saw with a funny
    feeling in the pit of her stomach—he had changed. His voice was deeper, no longer cracking and
    awkward. The round boy’s face had grown planes and angles. And was that fuzz on his upper lip?
    “I never knew you liked to read,” he said, and she realized that he had been watching her stare at
    him.
    “You never asked,” she blurted out.
    But he only laughed. “No, I don’t suppose I did. But then I never see you alone without Pen.”
    “She reads too, you know,” she couldn’t help saying pertly. “And you could have told us that you
    like to read.”
    “With a name like Lochinvar, how could I not? I’ve been reading Sir Walter Scott since I found my
    name in the book of his poems in our schoolroom.”
    “‘So faithful in love and so dauntless in war,/There never was knight like the young Lochinvar,”’
    Persy quoted. “Well, the war part was certainly right, at least as far as we were concerned.” She
    tensed to run but he laughed again.
    “I hope we can call a truce now, Persy.”
    She had seen him only twice more after that, when he was down from Cambridge. Both occasions
    had been more formal ones, over tea in the salon with Mama and Papa and Lord Northgalis, but he
    had chatted with her about what she was reading and studying with Ally. She did not tell him that she
    had pestered her father to find every book he mentioned, both favorably and unfavorably, so that she
    could read them. Or that she replayed their conversations in her head over and over again, for weeks
    afterward.
    Now, walking down the stairs with Charles snuggled under her arm, Persy’s mind raced. Lochinvar
    had been nicer to her that summer because he had grown up. Because it had become more amusing to
    talk about books with her than chase her bellowing about the garden with a fat toad in each hand.
    But she’d grown up, too. Would he still care to talk about books with a young woman, the way he
    had with a girl? Or would he think her overeducated? Young ladies in society were supposed to flirt
    and giggle, not discuss literature and philosophy. Now he’d surely think her a dreadful bluestocking.
    He’d never think that about Pen. Persy thought about the pleased smile Pen had given