Free Reckless Griselda by Harriet Smart Page B

what you said to me?” she cried out in exasperation. “You called me a perfect child of nature. What do you expect of me now? Simpering conventional regret? Tears? I have never behaved like that in my life and I do not intend to do so now.”
     
    “Good God, I should have known better! I should have seen what you were,” he said. “I do not know what I thought you were. But it should have been perfectly plain to me. Why did I allow myself to be…” He broke off and looked at her, just as he had done the day before, and then frowned, angry at himself. “I should have left you to get wet, Miss Farquarson. That is what I should have done!”
     
    “And I wish you had,” said Griselda, walking into the bow window and turning her back on him pointedly.
     
    At that moment the door opened and Lady Amberleigh and Caroline came in and she was spared the pain of any more private conversation with him.
     
    ***
     
    Dinner concluded, the ladies withdrew, leaving Colonel Farquarson and Tom with a decanter of port and the unspoken understanding that they would not drink above one or two glasses each and would quickly come upstairs to the drawing room for tea. Tom was tempted to drink himself under the table in the old-fashioned style, but the Colonel was a man of impeccable propriety and would not have permitted such a lapse.
     
    He could not have been much above thirty, Tom reckoned, but his experience of life and the world had given him a gravitas that in the present circumstances made Tom feel even worse. If Farquarson knew what had happened between him and his sister – well, the consequences of that did not bear thinking about. For Tom felt that the Colonel’s good opinion was a thing very worth having. A man would be fortunate to be able to call him a friend. Yet there did not seem much chance of that. In the circumstances it would be wrong to press intimacy upon him.
     
    During the meal Miss Farquarson had been seated next to him, so he did not have to look at her constantly across the table. But she had still been far too close for comfort. He could easily have reached out and laid his hand on her thigh and only the greatest effort of self-restraint prevented him from doing that. And from time to time he had not been able to resist turning to look at her: to notice her fingering the tiny curls at the nape of her long neck and then unthinkingly touch the lobe of the ear he had kissed with such delight. Her gestures were all full of sensuality. Even to see her sip her wine disturbed him.
     
    It was not that she was conventionally beautiful like Caroline. She was probably too thin about the face and certainly too tall, and her complexion was not perfect by any means. But she had dominated the room, and had seemed a hundred times more desirable than she had before. Knowing who she was and what she felt of him ought to have checked his feelings, but as the meal passed, and he glanced at her and heard her talk, and worse still laugh, he felt he could only want her more and more. She had been for him the only really interesting object in the room. And even now, as he sat over the wine with Colonel Farquarson, he found herself looking at her empty place at the table, placing her there in his imagination again.
     
    He reached for the decanter and refilled his glass. He had never thought of Caroline like that.
     
    “Come now,” said Farquarson, smiling at him. “The situation isn’t quite so melancholy. The odds may seem stacked against you but the prize is worth the struggle.”
     
    “Yes, indeed,” said Tom, rousing himself a little.
     
    “Go and remind yourself of it,” he said.
     
    “I shall,” said Tom and swallowed down a large mouthful of port. “We shall go and ask Miss Rufford to sing. She sings more beautifully than you can imagine.”
     
    He was not lying. Caroline was an accomplished performer and he decided he would ask her to sing all those songs which had first charmed him. He would sit in