Free Love and the Loathsome Leopard by Barbara Cartland

terror which enveloped their lives – all must have left a mark.
    Yet when the candles were lit and she came to sit not on the chair opposite him but on the hearthrug at his feet, he thought how young and helpless she was to cope with the difficulties and problems that confronted her.
    “Tell me about yourself,” she said after a moment.
    “What do you want to know?”
    “So many things that I cannot put into words,” she answered. “Not like Richard, about your experiences in war, but what you think and what you want of life.”
    She paused, and then as Lord Cheriton did not speak, she said,
    “When I first saw you, I thought there was something hard and perhaps cruel about you. Then when we talked together I realised it was a reserve which you wear like an armour so that people should not encroach too closely on what you do not wish them to know.”
    Lord Cheriton looked at her in astonishment, before he realised she was speaking not of his work but of him as a man.
    He thought that of all the women he had ever known, none had ever sensed that his harshness and ruthlessness stemmed from a reserve he had assumed ever since running away from home at the age of fourteen.
    “I think,” Wivina was saying in her soft voice, “perhaps you restrain your affection for people and life because you are afraid of being hurt.”
    It was so true that Lord Cheriton drew in his breath, as Wivina continued,
    “I can understand your feeling like that, because it is what I feel myself. Loving Papa and losing him was so agonising that in a way I wished I had not loved him so much.”
    She looked up at Lord Cheriton and looked away again as she went on,
    “You will think it is foolish of me to love this house, since because I love it so much I am vulnerable. Perhaps I should go away and live somewhere else, simply because every day I remain here it will hurt me more when I have to leave.”
    She spoke seriously, then she gave a little laugh.
    “I am not expressing myself at all well and you will think I am very foolish.”
    “I think you have expressed yourself extremely well and you are not in the least foolish. I am only surprised, Wivina, that you should be so perceptive.”
    “About – you?”
    “About me, and about yourself. Most people flutter like butterflies on the surface of life. They don’t think deeply, nor do they wish to do so.”
    “To think deeply and to feel deeply is to risk being hurt.”
    That was what had happened to him, Lord Cheriton thought, but he had never expected a woman, least of all a young girl, to understand or to feel the same.
    Aloud he said,
    “Because our minds move in the same way, I think it important, Wivina, that we should try to help each other. And if we are to do that we must talk frankly and without pretence.”
    There was a little pause before she said in little above a whisper,
    “I would like to do that, but I am afraid – and we have only just met.”
    “But you are wise enough to know that time has very little to do with such things,” Lord Cheriton replied. “You may be with a man or a woman for years and know as little about them as when you first met.”
    “That is true,” Wivina conceded, “but with other people you are aware that they are – cruel and evil – and they are reaching out towards you – and you want to run away – but your feet will not carry you.”
    She was trembling as she spoke and she bent her head so that her words were almost inaudible.
    Then as he bent towards her to reply, the door of the salon was suddenly flung open and someone came hurriedly into the room.
    Both Lord Cheriton and Wivina looked up startled from where they sat at the hearth, and for a moment it was difficult to see who stood there in the shadows, although they both knew who it was.
    Jeffrey Farlow came towards them and Lord Cheriton knew that Wivina was suddenly rigid, her eyes watching the man as if she was a small animal mesmerised by the stealthy approach of a