Read 108. An Archangel Called Ivan for Free Online Page B

about them. I am just thankful that I can live here at the moment with my parents and enjoy being able to ride beautiful horses that I never believed in my wildest dreams would ever be mine.”
    Arliva clapped her hands.
    “That is the right way to look at it and, of course, the horses are glad to be yours and never stop to count up what you spend on them.”
    “That is indeed very true,” Peregrine laughed, “and in five years’ time, when you have had this world at your feet, you will realise that people love you for yourself even though you are suspicious of it. Then you will forget what you are feeling now and just make the best of things as they are. Which I am sure is, in fact, the very best way.”
    “Of course it is,” Arliva agreed. “But I am afraid I want more, much, much more than what you are telling me.”
    “Come and dance,” he said, “and I will continue my lecture.”
    They then went out of the dining room and into the ballroom where the band was just beginning to play very softly.
    They danced round the floor.
    Then he said,
    “I ought to have attended this ball with my fiancée whom you have not as yet met. We are announcing our engagement next week and I hope that you will be friends with her as I know she will want to be friends with you.”
    “Why should she want to?” Arliva asked.
    “Because she really enjoys meeting people who are different. She has already complained that the people we have had here up to now have been much of a muchness. In fact I have a feeling at the back of my mind that I will find myself sailing for some strange land before we have had time to settle down in our new house.”
    “She must be charming!” Arliva exclaimed. “Far too many people have no interest outside their own small circle. That, as you know, always ends in boredom.”
    “It is absurd for you to be talking like this at your age,” Peregrine asserted. “I am ten years older than you and I am now going to prophesy that, if you are looking for the stars, you will eventually find them.”
    He paused for a moment before he added,
    “But it is a long haul up into the sky to where they are!”
    Arliva laughed, but later when she was going home she remembered what Peregrine had said and thought that perhaps he was right.
    Was she completely mad to go off on her own to try to find people who would like her for herself and not for her money?
    When she said goodnight, her aunt Molly said,
    “You were a great success tonight, dearest. You looked lovely and I was very very proud of you. It’s a pity our host is already engaged because he is such a charming young man and I think he would have been a very suitable husband for you.”
    “Are you really looking for a husband for me?” Arliva asked.
    Her aunt smiled.
    “How can I help it? Their mothers, their aunts, their cousins all come and tell me that they have exactly the right husband for you and, as soon as you meet him, you will realise it for yourself and fall in love.”
    “You have not asked yourself if they want to meet me,” Arliva countered.
    There was a short silence.
    And then her aunt replied,
    “Of course, my dearest, you are so pretty and so charming that all the men want to meet you.”
    ‘Also so rich,’ Arliva thought to herself, but did not say it aloud.
    Only when she went up to her bedroom and closed the door did she think that whatever her aunt might say and whatever anyone else might say, she was doing the right thing.
    She was starting off on a voyage of discovery.
    If she failed, she only had to go back and the Social world would be waiting for her with open arms.
    ‘Of course,’ she thought, ‘I may not find anyone. In which case it will be the same answer, back again to the old routine.’
    Yet somehow she knew that she was being guided in the right direction.
    Somehow, perhaps by some miracle she would find what she was seeking and could view the world in a very different way from how she was viewing it at the