The Temptation of Torilla by Barbara Cartland

shovel shaft,” he had said furiously one day to Torilla, “and a shovel shaft costs sixpence here, although hitherto it has cost twopence.”
    “Can nothing be done?” Torilla had asked once again.
    “Who cares if the men are cheated?” the Vicar had asked scathingly.
    Certainly not the wealthy Marquis! He is a man with castles and houses, servants and racehorses and now he is taking an expensive wife.
    She heard the voices in the hall drawing nearer to the door and she braced herself for a contact with the man she thought of as ‘the devil’.
    She tightened her hold on the great bunches of lilies which she still held in her arms and her eyes were wide and dark in her pale face as she waited.
    Then she could not look, it was so frightening.
    Beryl came in first.
    “Here is Gallen, dearest Torilla, and now you can meet him!”
    A man followed Beryl into the salon, his polished hessian boots reflecting the furniture and the chaos of paper, flowers and presents on the floor.
    With an effort Torilla raised her eyes, then her heart turned a double-somersault in her breast.
    She thought that the ceiling fell down on her head and the whole room whirled around her!
    It was not the Marquis of Havingham who followed Beryl, but Sir Alexander Abdy!

CHAPTER FOUR
    Torilla walked in through the gates of the Park and saw the ground beneath the oak trees covered with a golden carpet of daffodils.
    It was early in the morning because she had been to the seven o’clock Communion in the little village Church where she had been christened.
    There were only half-a-dozen other people at the service and, when it was over, Torilla went to the Churchyard to stand beside her mother’s grave under a yew-tree.
    She looked down at the plain headstone and found it hard to believe that her mother, whom she had loved so deeply and who had always been so sweet and understanding, had left her.
    Then she had told herself this was not true.
    Her mother’s spirit was alive and Torilla was convinced that, wherever she might be, her thoughts and love would always be with her father and herself.
    ‘Help me, Mama, to do what I can for Beryl,’ Torilla said in her heart. ‘Knowing how he treats the people in Barrowfield how can I let her marry the Marquis?’
    She did not include it in her prayers, but she knew, if she was honest, that her feelings about the Marquis were conflicting and confused.
    How, when she knew him to be a monster of callousness and cruelty, could he also be the man who had evoked such a Divine rapture within herself that even to think of his kiss still made her quiver?
    Ever since he arrived at The Hall, she had found it impossible to look at him or to meet his eyes.
    When he entered the salon, she curtsied automatically without any conscious volition on her part and her heart had been beating so furiously in her breast that she had thought he must hear it.
    Her eyelashes were very dark against her pale cheeks.
    Then, as she rose, she heard him say,
    “Delightful to meet you, Miss Clifford!”
    She told herself then that her feelings against him were no less vehement than before his arrival and yet there was an undoubted tremor in her voice as she answered politely,
    “Thank you – my Lord.”
    Beryl was quite unaware that there was any tension between the Marquis and her cousin.
    “Come and look at our presents, Gallen,” she had said pulling him by the arm. “They are quite nauseating and the only thing we can do is to give them away to other unfortunate couples in the future.”
    As she took the Marquis towards the untidy mess of presents, letters and paper, Torilla, still clenching the lilies against her, had escaped.
    How could it be possible, she asked herself as she ran upstairs, that the Marquis was Sir Alexander Abdy, the man who, despite every resolution, she had dreamt about every night since she had last seen him and thought about a thousand times a day?
    ‘I hate him! I hate him!’ she told herself over and