The Foundling by Georgette Heyer Read Free Book Online Page B

break his heart!"
    "Can you never bring yourself to hurt anyone's feelings, my little one?" asked Gideon, with his crooked smile.
    "Not the feelings of people who are attached to me," answered Gilly simply.
    "Then there is no hope for you!" said his cousin.
    Gilly was unhappily inclined to believe him.
    And now it appeared that there was another person to be added to the list of those whose feelings the Duke could not bring himself to wound. He did not know whether his intended bride was fond of him, but she was gentle, and shy, and, if his uncle were to be believed, she was depending upon him to make her a Duchess. The Duke had not been made a member of various clubs, and participated in a London season, without assimilating certain social facts. He had very little doubt that Lady Harriet's chances of securing him for a husband were being freely betted upon at White's, and to blast all her hopes, to set her up to be the butt of every ill-natured wit in town, would, he realized, be conduct wholly unbefitting a gentleman.
    His mood of dejection deepened. Lying back in one corner of his chaise, his eyes on the bobbing forms of the postilions, he tried to think about Lady Harriet, and found it difficult. She had been so very correctly brought-up, had been of late years so zealously chaperoned, that he could not feel that he knew very much about her. There had been a great deal of intercourse between his family and hers; she had very often stayed at Sale Park, or at Cheyney, his house near Bath; and when they had been children he had liked her very well—better, in fact, than the more assertive children of his acquaintance. He still liked her very well, but the easy intercourse they had once enjoyed had latterly dwindled, perhaps from his own consciousness of the future laid down for them both, perhaps from the lady's increasing shyness. He had squired her to the Opera, and danced with her at Almack's; he found it easier to talk to her than to any other lady of his acquaintance; but she was not the bride of his independent choice, and although he had no very clear idea of what this imaginary damsel might be like, he felt sure that she did not resemble poor little Harriet.
    But since he knew, naturally, that he must marry a lady of impeccable lineage, he was forced to own that Harriet would suit him decidedly better than any other marriageable young female of his set. Only it was all very dull; and without having the least ambition to many to disoblige his family, as the saying was, he did wish that he could have found a wife for himself, and that not a lady whom he had known from his cradle.
    He wondered what it would have been like not to have been born in the purple, but to have been some quite unimportant person—not of too lowly a degree, of course, for that would certainly have been uncomfortable. He might have been obliged to live in Thatch End Cottages, for instance, with a leaking roof; or have been snapped up by the press gang; or even, perhaps (since he had always been undersized) have become the slave of a chimney-sweep. It was undoubtedly better to be the seventh Duke of Sale than a sweep's apprentice, but he was much inclined to think that to have been plain Mr. Dash, of Nowhere in Particular, would have been preferable to either of these callings.
    He began to picture the life of plain Mr. Dash, and was still lost in a pleasant, if slightly ill-informed, reverie when his chaise swept into the forecourt of his house in Curzon Street.
    He came down to earth with a thud. Mr. Dash inhabited one of those cosy little terrace houses in a quiet corner of the town, and when he returned to his dwelling after a convivial evening spent with his cronies, playing French hazard, and getting his feet wet, he let himself into his house with his own key, and found no one at all who cared a button where he had been, or what he had been doing. None of his servants had ever known his father. In fact, he had very few servants: just a