Miss Milton Speaks Her Mind by Carla Kelly Read Free Book Online

entirely recovered. As it was, she certainly never extended an invitation to Mr. Butterworth to take his mutton with them.
    â€œ Miss Milton, won’t you come inside until the rain lets up?” She had a ready excuse on her lips—it was late, she was expected at Stover Hall—and she would have delivered it, if she had not looked down at Mr. Butterworth’s feet.
    He was wearing house slippers of such a virulent shade of lime green yarn that the colors almost spoke to her. “Sir, what on earth are you doing out here worrying about me, when your feet are … my goodness, Mr. Butterworth, but that is an … an exceptional color.”
    He merely smiled and offered her his arm, and for some unaccountable reason, she took it. He will catch his death if I make him stand outside in the rain and argue about whether I should come inside, she rationalized as she let him hurry her along the lane toward the house. Heaven knows he is not a young man, even if he is not precisely old, either.
    He did pause for a moment to raise up one slipper from the wet gravel of the lane. “My dear niece made these for me last Christmas. My sister teases me that they were only just Amanda’s practice piece, but I think them quite acceptable.”
    â€œ They are, indeed,” she replied, as she allowed herself to be led where she had never gone before. “Am I to assume that you saw me from your window and thought I needed rescuing so badly that you would risk a present from a niece?”
    She had never thought herself a witty person, but Mr. Butterworth threw back his head and laughed, which meant that the umbrella went, too, and the rain pelted on her forehead again.
    â€œ Oh, I am a poor Sir Galahad, indeed, Miss Milton,” he said, when he straightened the umbrella. “But yes, that is it entirely.” She smiled at him, thinking that no one in England looked less like Sir Galahad than Scipio Africanus Butterworth. She thought he might have over forty years to his credit, but she could not be sure. She was not tall, but standing this close to Mr. Butterworth, she felt even shorter than usual. He was taller even than Lord Denby, and massive without being fat. He could have been intimidating, had his general demeanor been less kind. Years ago over dinner at Stover Hall, Blair had declared that the Almighty had obviously broken the mold with the mill owner. She thought that unfair, and so informed her cousin with a vehemence that surprised her.
    She thought of that now, as she found herself being led up the Butterworth lane to the front door. He was directing some pleasantry to her, but all she could see was what she always saw about him: the brownest of eyes with their glance of utter enthusiasm belonging to a far younger man. He also looked so benign, a trait she had never much associated with the district’s general opinion of mill owners.
    This perpetual air of good feeling had always amazed her about him and nothing had intervened in the ten years of their acquaintance to change that. Although Lady Carruthers had sniffed that their new neighbor “smelled of the shop” and that he would never be permitted to pollute the Stover environs, their equals in the village of Denby had not been so scrupulous.
    Lady Carruthers had always blamed Blair for seeing that Mr. Butterworth was named to the board of directors of the town’s charity hospital. “But, Aunt, he donates far more than anyone else, and twice as much as we do,” Blair had pointed out, on one of his infrequent furloughs home from the army. “I’m too far away most of the time to do my duty, and do you know, I think that someone with management skills would be a welcome addition. Besides, he had added. “He isn’t the sort of man I would like to argue with, for all that he is so pleasant.”
    That Mr. Butterworth proved to be a tremendous asset to the board only increased Lady Carruthers’