Free The Lorimer Legacy by Anne Melville Page B

efforts to achieve them. With affection and sincerity she apologized for the distress which she knew she must have caused. But nowhere in the letter did she mention the name of William Lorimer.
    It was a complicated mixture of feelings which held her back. There had quite certainly been a time, as she ran from the Honourable Duncan Glanville in her bedroom at Glanville House, when she had believed that William Lorimer had deliberately sent her to her ruin. Now that she was not only out of danger but was enjoying the very privileges which William had promised her, although from another source, she did not feel quite the same certainty. It was possible that his offer of help had been genuine, although misplaced. Because Alexa had never liked him she found it easiest to suspend judgement – she had no need to be grateful, and therefore had resolved never to see him again.
    But such a course was not something to be inflicted on Margaret, who was his sister. Alexa realized that if she were to tell even part of the truth, she was liable to cause trouble. It would certainly upset Margaret if she were to believe that her brother had deliberately entrusted Alexa to a scoundrel – but she would be equally unhappy to learn that it was William who had advised Alexa to abandon the dullness of a country life and devote herself to a career of which Margaret was known to disapprove, without even pausing to discuss her plans. To precipitate a family quarrel would be unkind. A widow with a small son needed all the support that the other members of herfamily could give her. Treading a delicate path between tact and truth, Alexa left unsaid whatever could cause ill-feeling. When she handed her letter to Lord Glanville on the day of his return to England, her conscience was at peace for the first time in weeks.
2
    The best antidote to the reproach of failure is hard work. On a wintry Sunday afternoon Margaret was sitting close to the fire, trying to keep her anxieties about Alexa under control by studying some figures which she had collected over the past two years. The subject was not a romantic one. She was considering how many schoolchildren in her area had been discovered to have hair infested with lice, how many days’ schooling they had missed, and how soon and how often the infestation had recurred, in the hope that the pattern of the problem would suggest some means of eliminating it. When Betty announced a caller, Margaret was at first a little irritated by the interruption. Then she read the name on his card. It was Lord Glanville.
    A few weeks earlier the name would have meant nothing to her. But when she had written to remind Alexa that she must not outstay her welcome at Brinsley House, William had been forced to reveal that her ward had left the country and – with a nearer approach to apology than was usual to him – had admitted his own part in Alexa’s plan to escape from a country life which she found too dull. The meeting had ended in a quarrel. Seeking to excuse himself, William had hinted that the introduction he had given to Alexa, intended to keep her from home only for twenty-four hours, had been to agentleman of the utmost respectability. If she had abandoned this arrangement in favour of an expedition to the Continent in the company of an aristocrat whose motives could only be guessed at, that was not William’s responsibility. Margaret in return had suggested that he would never have allowed his own daughter to make even such a brief visit without a chaperone, and that she herself ought to have been informed immediately of Alexa’s disappearance. They had parted in anger – but Margaret had at least been given the name of the nobleman and two addresses in England.
    They had proved to be of little use. The housekeeper at Blaize, Lord Glanville’s country house, and his secretary in the Park Lane town house, had given the same answers. Lord Glanville was visiting Germany and Austria