Elisabeth Kidd Read Online Free PDF

the viscount still clutched in the same hand that held his modish hat, she advised him, “I should purchase that novel, if I were you. It is quite out of the common way. The author is most adept at depressing pretension and showing up for precisely what they are worth such persons as—for example—wear town fashions in the country, deliberately to cast the local gentry into the shade.”
    Kedrington glared down at her, but she only enquired sweetly, “Grossly uncivil, don’t you agree?” and precipitated the viscount—whom she had rightly perceived to be maintaining only the most precarious hold on propriety—into abandoning it altogether. Their eyes caught, and both laughed aloud.
    Mr Kenyon overheard them and turned his head in their direction. Kedrington had only time to whisper, “Lives Lady Disdain, Miss Fairfax?” before he rejoined them, demanding to know the joke.
    “No jest, sir,” said the lady. “Merely the novelty of such as Lord Kedrington in these benighted parts. We are not much addicted to London manners here.”
    “Pooh, nonsense!” Mr Kenyon protested. “It is not so very long ago that you yourself decreed those manners, my dear. Surely you have not forgotten when all London was at your feet?”
    “I sincerely hope London has forgotten it! And if the lure of the metropolis is sufficient to keep you from home so frequently, Uncle Philip, I have reason enough to take exception to it.”
    Mr Kenyon smiled fondly at her. “But I only go to visit Charles, you know—when he can bear to have me underfoot. When not—why, I go somewhere else!”
    Kedrington thought a shadow briefly darkened Miss Fairfax’s blue eyes, but she replied lightly, “Why, yes! You are as likely to be flitting off to examine some race horse in Ireland, or a new variety of gas lamp in Bristol.”
    Kenyon chuckled modestly. “I’m too old to change my ways now, m’dear, however ramshackle they may be, and too old to be posting all the way here whenever Pomfret writes that such-and-such a cottage has fallen into disrepair, or to ask if I think eight sheep to the acre is too many or if we should lease out more pasturage, when half the time I haven’t the least notion what he’s talking about.”
    Miss Fairfax looked as if she could well believe this, but not being so tactless as to say so, she made no remark. Lord Kedrington paid for his book, and all three left the shop.
    “We shall escort Miss Fairfax on her way,” Mr Kenyon announced. “It would not be kind of us to abandon her to the ogling of every demi-beau in town!”
    Lord Kedrington acquiesced with suitable gravity, but Miss Fairfax protested that she was quite accustomed to walk out alone.
    “I shall be perfectly safe, I assure you, sirs! Melton is still a country town, where a lady may go about unchaperoned with no fear of being molested by gentlemen with ... London manners!”
    Mr Kenyon kept her hand imprisoned in his, however, and she made no further demur when the gentlemen accompanied her down the South Parade. It was soon apparent—much to Miss Fairfax’s gratification and Lord Kedrington’s chagrin—that the object of attention on the street was to be not the young lady but the fashionable gentleman.
    Several heads turned to watch him, and although he continued to make polite conver sation, the viscount expected too much of Miss Fairfax if he believed that she would imitate his sublime disregard of a bold damsel dressed in a sable-trimmed redingote, who passed them with an appraising look and a flirtatious smile. Antonia looked back after the lady, smiling benignly in return. The viscount, caught in midsentence, sputtered to its end and protested, “Miss Fairfax, you are shameless!”
    Miss Fairfax was all innocence. “I, sir?”
    “Do not play the ingénue with me, madam! I know what you are about.”
    “But I should have imagined that to be just your style, my lord.”
    Curiosity compelled him to ask, “Is that how you fancy my style,