Free 65 A Heart Is Stolen by Barbara Cartland

find amazingly beautiful women who can call parakeets out of an English lime tree and have them sitting tamely on their hands and arms.”
    He gave a sigh.
    “I have never seen anything so beautiful as that girl looked.”
    “Woman!” the Marquis corrected.
    “I bet you she is not a day over eighteen,” Anthony said, “and she cannot have been married long. Once a woman is married, she looks married.”
    He paused as if searching for the right words and then went on,
    “She loses something, the innocence that had made her appear untouched.”
    The Marquis looked at him with undisguised astonishment.
    “You never cease to surprise me, Anthony,” he said, “but I am rather inclined to agree with you, although, as it happens, I have known very few young girls.”
    “There are very few as pretty as – what was her name? Ivana Wadebridge,” Anthony replied.
    “Well, you will see her tomorrow evening,” the Marquis said. “In the meantime I intend to look further afield for our highwaymen and I have no intention of letting a pretty face and a covey of parakeets divert me from tracking them down.”
    Anthony did not argue, but the Marquis had the feeling that he thought it was a forlorn hope.
    *
    The next day the Marquis and Anthony drove miles in their efforts to find anyone who had seen the highwaymen.
    Despite Mr. Markham’s discouraging information that they had few neighbours, the Marquis made enquiries in the neighbouring villages and personally visited a number of people living on small farms or on the outskirts of hamlets, who were both astonished and gratified to be called on by the owner of Heathcliffe.
    They had all heard of his father, they all admired Heathcliffe and they fawned on the Marquis in a manner that Anthony told him was extremely bad for him.
    “It’s all inflating to your ego,” he said when they were going home after a fruitless day on which the Marquis had gained no information, but had collected a great number of admirers.
    “I thought they were very pleasant,” the Marquis said. “The only trouble is that none of them have heard of the highwaymen.”
    “I begin to think they don’t exist,” Anthony muttered. “The wine was too good and we just dreamt the whole incident.”
    “In which case I would like my watch and my snuffboxes back,” the Marquis said sharply.
    “Well, we can forget highwaymen for tonight and concentrate on the blue-eyed beauty. As she had a magic way with parakeets, she might be clairvoyant enough to tell us where they are hiding.”
    The Marquis laughed.
    “She might be hiding a dozen or more in that huge barn of hers.”
    Even as he spoke he stiffened.
    He was remembering something; something that he had not thought about until this moment.
    “What is it?” Anthony asked.
    “Do you know,” the Marquis said, “when she had those parakeets fluttering all around her, I am convinced that we were not the only people watching them.”
    “What do you mean by that?” Anthony asked.
    “Now I think of it I am almost sure, although it made no impression on me at the time, that I saw a face at one of the windows in the barn.”
    “She said it was locked up.”
    “I know. She also said that she and her old nurse were alone in the house. If that is true, where was the man to whom the wooden leg belonged?”
    “He was obviously a gardener,” Anthony suggested.
    “Maybe, but one gardener could not have kept that garden as tidy as we saw it to be. What is more, I don’t believe her old nurse, who must be over sixty, could have polished those stairs, the furniture, the floors and the brass. I could see my face in them.”
    “You are concocting a good story,” Anthony laughed. “But at the same time, if you ask me, you are making mountains out of molehills. Ivana is a simple, charming, open country girl with blue eyes and if you think she has highwaymen locked up in her barn – ”
    “It is as likely as if she had parakeets in a lime tree!” the