Read The Glittering Lights (Bantam Series No. 12) for Free Online Page A

high table, the shadow of her perfect features portrayed upon a plain wall behind her.
    “She looks very lovely, Papa,” Cassandra agreed.
    Her father had shown her several other photographs and then he said:
    “There is no need to mention to your mother that I keep these. It is just that I was trying to explain to you the way I want you to appear.”
    “I quite understand, Papa.”
    Sir James put the photographs away in his drawer.
    “Photography may be a new art,” he said, “but that is not going to stop every half-witted fool who can afford a camera thinking he is a photographer.”
    Turning over the pages of the Album which now covered no less than fourteen years of the Marquis of Charlburys life, Cassandra told herself the whole thing was hopeless.
    How could she marry a man who was interested in her only because she owned a fortune?
    Her father might talk of a mariage de convenance. He might say it was usual in society, but there were still a large number of people who married for love, and she wished to be one of them.
    She had been thinking about it for a long time—in fact for all the months that her father had been eagerly awaiting a letter from the new Duke. She had felt certain it would not arrive.
    She had been wrong!
    But she was sure that it had eventually turned up, not because the Duke wanted to see her, but because he had reached the stage where he needed money too desperately to procrastinate any longer.
    She stared at an article giving a long description of Alchester Park which had appeared in the Illustrated London News.
    It was not hard from the description to imagine the splendour of what was one of the most famous houses in England.
    Covering several acres of land, the ancestral seat of the Dukes of Alchester, it had been built in the reign of Elizabeth I and had housed at some time or another almost every reigning Monarch.
    It was magnificent, it was splendid, a little over-powering, and yet Cassandra could understand it was a suitable back-ground for the young man of whom the newspapers had written such glowing accounts even when he was a mere boy.
    She turned the pages of the Album again. His face looked out at her from every one.
    He was not so thin and so sharp-featured as he had been when he captained the Eton Eleven, but his hair still grew back in a straight line from his forehead.
    Even in the rather harsh photograph sketches which were the nearest the illustrated papers could get to reproducing photographs, his eyes still seemed to hold that curious searching look she had noticed when she first saw him.
    She had loved her memories of him, she had loved every scrap of information she could glean about him. But now she realised she no longer wanted to marry him.
    Cassandra gave a little sigh.
    ‘I would rather marry a man for whom I had no feelings at all,’ she told herself.
    That was indeed true.
    It might be unpleasant, even a little frightening, to marry someone she hardly knew and for whom she had no affection, but to marry someone with whom she thought herself in love would be sheer unmitigating hell if he had no feeling for her except one of duty.
    It would be his duty to touch her ... it would be his duty to kiss her ... it would be his duty to make love to her ... to give her children...
    Cassandra, like all her contemporaries, was very innocent and was not quite certain what that entailed. But she knew it must be something close and intimate.
    “Mama, why do people who sleep in the same bed have babies?” she had asked Lady Alice once, when she was very young.
    Lady Alice had hesitated before she replied:
    “When you are married, Cassandra, your husband will explain such things to you.”
    Cassandra would have asked again, but sometimes she puzzled over it.
    Now she knew she could not sleep in the same bed with a man she loved, as she loved the Marquis, but who did not love her.
    “I couldn’t bear it!” she said aloud.
    She closed the Albums with a bang and put them