Joan Wolf by Lord Richards Daughter

blue-green eyes were turned on the young man. “How do you do, my lord,” he said a little stiffly. Lord Rutherford looked up to meet that brilliant gaze and caught an expression that startled him. It was gone in an instant and Lord Denham was shaking hands, but Lord Rutherford was a little unnerved by the very unpleasant expression he had seen briefly in the other man’s eyes. Then Lord Denham was asking Julianne to dance and they went out together to the ballroom floor.
    “So that is the new Earl of Denham,” Lord Rutherford said to the dowager duchess. “How does he know Julianne?”
    “They met while she was in Africa,” replied the old woman. “Lord Denham knew my son.”
    “I see,” said Lord Rutherford tensely. He knew that John Champernoun had been out in Egypt. Lansdowne was not far from Minton and his family had naturally been interested in what was going to happen to the Denham family fortunes.
    The dowager duchess looked at the young man’s face and felt profound annoyance with the new Earl of Denham. Confound it all, she thought to herself, with healthy eighteenth-century vulgarity, why hadn’t the man stayed in Egypt?
    “Your fiancé,” John was saying to Julianne as they slowly circled the room. “You didn’t waste any time, did you?”
    His tone of voice was distinctly sarcastic, but Julianne did not respond. She was too happy to see him. “Never mind Rutherford,” she said impatiently. “John, you’ll never believe what’s happened. A publisher has taken my journal!”
    His eyes blazed into the blueness she remembered so well. “I knew it!” he said. “Didn’t I tell you? What did he say?”
    “Mr. Murray said”—her voice bubbled with suppressed emotion—”that he couldn’t put it down. He said parts of it were like poetry.”
    They were waltzing and now he pulled her closer to him and spun around in a breathless, twirling circle. Julianne was laughing, her face raised to his. Her crown of golden hair came just to his mouth. “Everyone is looking at us!” she protested.
    “Let them.” But he slowed his steps. “I’m delighted. You have the eye of a born naturalist. And, as Mr. Murray said, you can write.”
    “I was so glad to see you tonight,” she confessed. “I only found out this afternoon and I was bursting to tell someone. When I saw you standing there it seemed too good to be true.”
    “Ah,” he said. “You haven’t told Lord Rutherford?”
    “No.” For the first time since they had met she looked a little wary. “I’m not quite sure if he’ll be pleased. They have such a feeling here about making oneself conspicuous. About women making themselves conspicuous, that is.”
    “Yes, well most women do not write like you do. Most women haven’t had the opportunities to see the things that you have seen.”
    “Most women didn’t have the father I had.”
    “True. You were very fortunate.” There was no satire in his voice and she stared up at him, trying to see if he was serious. He was. “Do you think you would be a writer on the verge of having a book published if you had had a conventional upbringing?” he asked. “I decided long ago that my relations had done me a favor by driving me away. I’ve had a damn good time with my life as a result.”
    The music stopped, the dance was over, yet he made no attempt to return her to her fiancé. She scanned his face with searching gray eyes. He looked back at her, a curious lift to his straight black brows. She could not read what was in his eyes.
    “Are you going to stay in England now that you’ve inherited?” she asked. “Or will you be going back to Egypt?”
    “I don’t know. I doubt if I could tolerate England on a permanent basis.” He looked away from her face and across the floor. “Here comes your fiancé,” he said blandly. “When is the date of your nuptials?”
    “November.”
    “Ah, November.” A faint smile curved his mouth as he watched Lord Rutherford come up to claim