Lace for Milady Read Online Free PDF

large house. Seaview is closer to the sea than I am, and it has the solarium."
    One would think his aunt was to have the “inconvenience” of polishing the floors and windows to hear him speak. “It isn’t that much closer, and as to the solarium it is more of a nuisance than anything else. It is very uncomfortable. We never use it.”
    “You are not invalids. My aunt would use it.”
    “She will not use it for nineteen years, sir. By that time I trust she will be either recovered to health or dead.”
    “Suit yourself. You have made a bad bargain, and I thought any intelligent person would be happy to extricate herself so easily. You will find no surfeit of buyers for a house that boasts no land of its own, not even the ground it stands on.”
    “I don’t want a surfeit of buyers, or even one.”
    Again that maddening, superior smile was on his hateful gypsy face. “You will look nohow when it is discovered in Pevensey how Lady Inglewood gulled you,” he said, trying a new tack to make me sell.
    “I don’t care what anyone thinks of me.”
    “I thought otherwise. Your quite foolish, and really very dangerous maiden ride in a spinney without a groom to help you led me to believe you preferred to keep your blunders to yourself. You should take your first lessons in a clear area that offers soft falling and no dangerous trees or obstacles. An enclosed field is recommended. And never alone, just in case you should get thrown—or dismount precipitately—and hurt your knee.”
    “I did not dismount precipitately.”
    “You did not dismount at all, madam. The word denotes some choice in the matter. You fell, due to your unique method of buckling the girth loosely. If you ever screw up your courage to try it again, get some help. And you would do better to get yourself a tame mount rather than tackling that spitfire Lady Inglewood keeps. I’m surprised she would let you out on such a spirited mount.”
    “She has nothing to say about what I ride. She is not my chaperone.”
    “Surely she has something to say about your ruining her favourite mount’s mouth with that manner in which you clutch at the reins.”
    “Juliette is my horse.”
    “Good God! Gulled again,” he said, in a choking voice, and went off into a series of ill-bred chuckles. He arose, still laughing. “I come to see you will be extremely easy to deal with. You will buy anything, and I have some hope that you will also sell me Seaview before many days are out.”
    “Hillcrest is not for sale.”
    “I am not interested in buying McCurdy’s place. It is this house that stands on my land I am after. And shall get, tard ou tôt . Good day, ma’am.” He executed two abbreviated bows toward Slack and myself and left.
    “I never met such an insufferably rude man in my life,” I said to Slack.
    “Sell it,” she replied.
    “Sell Hillcrest! I wouldn’t sell it for the world.”
    “You never called it Hillcrest before today, and it is too foolish to start doing so now, only because the Duke says it is called Seaview. He is a nasty, foreign-looking person to be sure, and not to be trusted any more than any other man, but still he offered a fair bargain, and I’m surprised you didn’t leap at it.”
    “Why does he want it? Why should he want this little place when he owns Belview, a monstrous house, and half the land between here and Dover. No, Slack, there is something afoot here, and I mean to find out what it is."
    My next move was to go storming over to Lady Inglewood’s and give her the sharp edge of my tongue. She was very civil, as she always is when she has won a point and knows very well she has been dishonest.
    “Oh, my dear, you are limping. I hope you didn’t take a spill from Juliette.”
    She wore bile green today, draped to reveal the layer of fat that encircled her waist like a cincture.
    “No, I twisted my knee coming down the stairs. The corner of the carpet at the bottom of the .stairs is loose, but I shall have it