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on the road, Natalia had accompanied her father to the Norman Abbey, which the Reverend Adolphus said he had always longed to visit.
    The great rounded arches, the stained-glass windows, and the immensely high Chancel had made Natalia feel that she offered her heart up to Heaven in gratitude for all that was happening and all that lay ahead of her.
    As she knelt beside her father, she had told herself she could never thank God enough for the happiness she had known as a child and the happiness that would be hers in her married life.
    “Thank You, God, thank You,” she whispered, and thought even as she prayed that a voice within herself told her that she was really blessed.
    “Tomorrow I shall see him,” she said later as she laid her head on the pillow.
    She was sure she would be unable to sleep but nevertheless she slept peacefully until the Lady’s Maid who had travelled with them came to call her.“ ’Tis eight o’clock Miss, and the Reverend Gentleman has already gone down to breakfast.”
    For a moment, Natalia could not remember where she was, then she gave a little cry of excitement.
    “We shall reach the Castle today, Ellen!” she exclaimed.
    “Yes, Miss, and very impressed you’ll be with it. They say there’s not a Castle in the whole length and breadth of the country to equal ours.”
    Natalia smiled at her. She had already learnt that Ellen had been at the Castle since she was very young and had in fact been born and bred in Herefordshire.
    “I shall see His Lordship,” she whispered almost to herself.
    “Yes, Miss, and I expect you will find a very grand wedding awaiting for you. When His Lordship organises anything, he always expects perfection.”
    “That is what my marriage will be,” Natalia murmured.
    She thought Ellen looked at her in rather a strange manner, then the Maid said:
    “I hopes you’ll bring His Lordship happiness, Miss. From all I hears he was hard done by in the past, and it’s only right he should be happy the second time.”
    Natalia did not reply.
    The thought of Lord Colwall’s first marriage was something she had pushed to the back of her mind and which she had not discussed with anyone, not even her mother.
    “Cousin Ranulf has been married before,” Lady Margaret had said when she had told Natalia the reason for her intensive education.
    “He was married!” Natalia ejaculated.
    “For a very short time,” Lady Margaret said.
    “What happened to his wife?”
    “There was an accident and—she died.” Lady Margaret answered hesitantly.
    Natalia had been curious, and yet at the same time something had prevented her from asking questions.
    She had not wanted to know. She had not wanted to think that her Knight, the man who was bliss, had ever belonged to another woman.
    It had seemed to her as if for a moment some of the light that illuminated the room when her mother had told her of Lord Colwall’s intentions, had been dimmed.
    Then she told herself she was being absurd! It had happened a long time ago, he had been very young, and by now he would have forgotten his sorrow.
    “Yet would one ever forget someone to whom one had been married?” an inner voice questioned.
    Natalia tried to think of herself in the same circumstances and failed.
    ‘Perhaps,’ she told herself, ‘It is different for a man . ’
    “There were no children of the marriage,” Lady Margaret was saying, “and I am praying, dearest, that you will have a son, perhaps more than one, and daughters, too, who will enjoy the Castle as much as I did as a child.”
    She said reminiscently:
    “It is a wonderful place for Hide and Seek with its twisting stairways, turrets and towers! It has all the things which appeal to a child’s imagination.”
    Natalia had thought of her mother’s words that night when she had gone to bed.
    Yes, she would love to have children. They would play in the Castle, and she would tell them the stories that her father had told to her. Of one thing she was quite