Read Lucky Logan Finds Love for Free Online Page B

what we owe Mr. Knight and Mr. Geary.”
    As she spoke, she put the money she was carrying down on the kitchen table.
    She was aware as she did so that the Bateses were looking at it with delight.
    “I’m sure that’ll be enough, Miss Belinda,” Bates said. “The shops in the village’ll be pleased to have their bills paid.”
    “Perhaps you would be kind enough,” Belinda said, “when you have finished helping Mrs. Bates, to pop down to the village and settle our accounts right away.”
    Belinda was thinking that the sooner the money was out of the house the better.
    “And glad they’ll be to have it, Miss Belinda,” Mrs. Bates said. “Things be bad enough these days without having bad debts!”
    Belinda did not answer.
    She merely returned to the hall to find her stepfather was coming down the stairs, carrying her father’s canes.
    He put them down on a chair so that it would be easy to transfer them to the chaise in which he had arrived.
    Belinda wondered if he had any money to pay the groom who had accompanied him. He was a lad from the village and had gone home after he had stabled the horses.
    She hoped the boy did not know anything about her stepfather’s financial troubles and it would be a mistake, she knew, for their situation to be gossiped about in the village.
    Her stepfather walked into the drawing room and Belinda followed him.
    “What we must do,” he said, “is to leave early tomorrow morning so that you can call on Lady Logan either just before luncheon or immediately afterwards.”
    He gave a somewhat twisted smile before he added,
    “Perhaps before would be better. She might invite you to a meal which at least would not cost you anything!”
    “Do you – think,” Belinda asked in a small voice, “that if she accepts me as her reader I will be able to start with her – straight away? Or will I be coming back – here?”
    “I said in my letter that you were available immediately,” D’Arcy Rowland replied. “Therefore it is up to you to make it clear that when you came to London you brought all your luggage with you and left it with a friend.”
    “At what time are we leaving?” Belinda asked.
    Her stepfather calculated for a moment.
    Then he said,
    “If we start off soon after eight o’clock, I can get you to Regent’s Park at noon.”
    “Regent’s Park?” Belinda repeated. “Is that where Lady Logan lives?”
    “Her son has bought her one of the most attractive houses in London,” her stepfather replied. “There are only six houses built in the centre of the Park and Lady Logan lives in one of them.”
    Belinda was not particularly interested.
    All she was thinking of was that if she had to leave for London so early, she must go upstairs now and pack, besides which, she also wanted to be alone.
    There was not only the shock of learning about her stepfather’s terrible predicament, but also the distress it had caused her to see her father’s personal items interfered with.
    Just as she had never gone back into her mother’s room because she knew it would upset her, so she had avoided the place where her father’s belongings had been kept.
    She knew if she saw them she would only cry and her father would tell her she was making herself unnecessarily miserable.
    Now the whole horror of all that her stepfather had done swept over her.
    She felt she could no longer go on talking to him.
    “I-I must go and – p-pack,” she said in a strangled voice and ran from the room.
    Upstairs in her bedroom she locked the door, threw herself down on her bed and wept bitterly.
    She had not cried since her mother’s death. Instead, she had summoned up a self-control of which she was sure her father would have been proud.
    She had tried to believe that her mother was not dead, but near her.
    Now she felt as if she had been abandoned by both her mother and her father.
    However hard she tried, she would lose her home and her stepfather would go to prison.
    ‘How can – this have