Charnbrook only from a sense of duty, and wearing her dress. Hers . Perhaps Kate’s figure stiffened. Jon suddenly forced his attention upon her. ‘It was jolly of you both to come,’ he said with a slight inflection on the ‘both’, ‘your cousin’s a top-hole little dancer. I hear her mama has a dressmaking establishment.’ Kate had a desire to scream establishment ? – it’ s nothing . She helps her mother – her adopted mother – in a back room of a dreary house in a big dirty town, and that dress she’s wearing is one of my cast-offs. Don’t you remember – it was me you saw in it first?
But she kept the flow of words back. She must retain her dignity at all costs. And anyway there was no point in trying to carry on any conversation against a background of music and dancing.
She and Rick spent most of the remaining hours together, either dancing, relaxing in the conservatory, or at the buffet. Nearing the end of the evening, when she accidentally dropped one of her white velvet gloves, he picked it up and said, ‘I will keep this as a memento,’ and put it in his pocket.
But at the finale, when the bars of the last waltz faded, she felt she really knew him little better than at the beginning of the party.
Her father’s Daimler was waiting in the drive below the front terrace steps, with Adam standing by to open the doors of the car for the two girls.
Ferris took Kate ’s hand and pressed it lightly before saying, ‘Au revoir. Be good.’ She didn’t look at his face, just nodded, and with her cloak pulled to her chin hurried to the car. She glanced back impatiently for Cassie, and saw her at the top of the steps, just out of the door with Jon trying to retain her attention, obviously whispering some endearment. Rick had disappeared. Cassandra tore herself away, and a minute later was seated by Kate on the lush back seat of the car while Adam cranked the engine.
Presently they were moving through the gates of the grounds and had turned past the lodge into the lane towards the main road.
Adam drove cautiously, never motoring above twenty miles an hour which was considered by most people quite fast for such a large car, especially at night.
Nothing to Kate seemed quite real any more. The rocky tumps of Burnwood Hills emerged fitfully against the landscape of trees and misted moonlight as they passed down the thread of roadway. The excitement and tension of the evening had left her exhausted emotionally, and it didn’t help matters when Cassandra said softly, ‘He’s nice, isn’t he?’
‘ Who?’ Crossly, although she knew.
‘ Jon.’
‘ He’s all right. I told you you’d be looked after. The Wentworths know how to behave.’
‘ He didn’t make me feel only like that though.’
Kate ’s head gave a jerk round. She hadn’t meant to look at Cassie; she didn’t want to. But something in the quiet voice, a certain smug sweetness, was too much for her.
Cassandra was staring ahead as though hypnotized, spell-bound, by some image or memory withheld from Kate. In the changing play of shadows reflected through the windows, of course, it was impossible actually to see her expression, but the stillness of the slim form swallowed in the blue velvet – the confident assertion and atmosphere only emphasized Kate’s conviction that Cassandra had somehow managed to inveigle herself into Jon’s affection and esteem. And it was ridiculous; she had no looks, no background, nothing at all in keeping with the Wentworth’s world. How had she managed it? Pity, perhaps, and a certain slyness that had played up to a sympathetic strain in Jon’s nature.
It must be that. Yes, Cassie had been sly. A real sly puss.
In spite of her tiredness Kate had a sudden desire to slap her cousin sharply across the cool pale cheek conveniently next to her.
But she again restrained herself.
One didn’t, after all, resort to vulgar brawls in a Daimler in the early hours of the morning. All the same – I