A Night of Gaiety by Barbara Cartland

shocked and horrified at what he had suggested.
    Then as she opened her lips to speak, Lord Mundesley put out his arms and drew her against him. At his touch she started to struggle violently.
    “No! No!” she cried. “How can you think of ... anything so wrong ... so wicked? You are a ... married man, and what you are ... suggesting is a ... sin against your wife ... and God.”
    She was so vehement that now it was Lord Mundesley’s turn to be surprised.
    He still had his arm round her, but there was an astonished expression on his face as she tried to push him away from her.
    “Now listen to me, Davita ...” he began, but with a sound that was almost a scream Davita interrupted:
    “I will not ... listen! Let me ... go! I do not ... want to hear any ... more!”
    She twisted herself from him, bent forward to open the carriage-door, and sprang out into the road, so intent on escaping that she did not realise that Lord Mundesley was making no effort to stop her.
    Then she was running down the pavement towards the door of her lodgings, and when she got there she found to her relief that the door was open as Billy was just taking in a parcel that had arrived from a tradesman.
    Davita ran past Billy and pounded up the stairs as if all the devils of hell were at her heels.
    When she reached her own room on the Second Floor, she rushed in, slammed the door behind her, locked it, and, edging her way round her trunks, threw herself down on the bed.
    “How ... dare ... he? How ... dare he ... suggest such a ... thing!” she panted.
    Her heart was beating suffocatingly, and as she ran away from Lord Mundesley her bonnet had fallen from her head and was suspended by the ribbons which had been tied under her chin.
    She flung her bonnet on the floor and lay face-downwards, her face in the pillow.
    So that was how men behaved in London! Now she understood not only what Lord Mundesley was suggesting to her, but what had happened to Rosie.
    How could she have known, how could she have guessed, that Rosie had been the Marquis’s mistress and he had thrown her out “bag and baggage” not because they were engaged to be married but because she was a woman for whom he had no further use.
    It was so shocking, so degrading, and Davita had never imagined she would come in contact with anything so evil.
    She had vaguely known that there were women who in the words of the Bible “committed adultery” and to whom nobody respectable would speak.
    There had been a girl in the village who had run away with a Piper who was married and could not marry her.
    Davita had heard the servants talking about her, and when she asked her mother what had happened, she had explained gently and carefully that the girl had lost the love and respect of her parents and of everybody else.
    “Why should she do such a thing, Mama?” Davita had asked.
    “Because she was tempted,” her mother had replied.
    “I do not understand,” Davita had protested, “why she should want to be with a man who cannot marry her.”
    “These things happen, dearest,” her mother had said, “but I do not want you to think about it now. It is something which is best forgotten.”
    But because the servants had not forgotten and had gone on talking about Jeannie, it had been impossible for Davita not to be curious.
    “I always knew she would come to no good,” she could hear them saying to one another. “She’ll rue the day she trusted a man who’d throw her aside when he’s had all he wants of her.”
    Davita wondered what he had wanted, but she knew if she asked questions nobody would explain.
    She heard two years later that Jeannie had had a baby and, having been deserted by the Piper, had drowned herself and the child.
    It was then that she had exclaimed to her mother:
    “How could such a terrible thing happen? And why did Jeannie not come home?”
    “If she had, they would not have let her in,” her mother had replied.
    “So you mean that her father and mother