The Glittering Lights (Bantam Series No. 12) by Barbara Cartland Page A

incident well! Abbey was an inveterate gambler. He never had a penny to his name and he was always full of stories of how his horse had been pipped at the post.”
    “Yes, I heard them too,” Cassandra said with a little smile.
    “One day when he was taking me out riding,” the Duke went on, “we stopped for a rest and I was running around, as small boys do, and found a discarded horseshoe.
    “ ‘Look, Abbey,’ I cried, ‘I have found a horseshoe.’
    “ ‘So you have, Master Varro,’ he replied. It’ll bring you luck’.”
    “I remember debating with myself for a moment, because I wanted to take the horseshoe back home to show my father, but then I said:
    ‘I think you need luck more than I do, Abbey,’ and I gave it to him.”
    “That is exactly the same story that he told me,” Cassandra said with a little cry of delight. “The horseshoe stood on his mantelpiece right up to the day of his death. It was in the place of honour and I think it did bring him luck.”
    “I have not thought of Abbey for years,” the Duke said. “I have an idea he went to work for a racehorse owner called Sir James Sherburn. Is that right?”
    “He may have,” Cassandra said lightly. “When I knew him he was far too old to work. He talked of nothing but horses.”
    “And what could be a better subject?” the Duke enquired. “Except of course, beautiful women!”
    There was no disguising the expression in his eyes.
    “I believe you are an acknowledged judge of both,” Cassandra answered.
    “Again you flatter me,” the Duke answered. “Shall I tell you I cannot resist a fine horse or a lovely woman, and you are very lovely, Miss Standish!”
    Cassandra could not prevent the blush rising in her cheeks, and for a moment her eye-lashes flickered shyly. Then she forced herself to say:
    “Your Grace is obviously also an expert flatterer.”
    “You say that with a cynical note in your voice which I do not like!” he said accusingly. “How can I convince you that I am sincere? Surely in the North, or wherever you come from, there must be men who have eyes in their heads and are not completely blind?”
    “They can see with their eyes,” Cassandra answered, “but perhaps they are not quite so glib with their tongues as you gentlemen in the South!”
    The Duke threw back his head and laughed.
    “You have an answer to everything. Come, let us go and dance and I hope that as you are a stranger to London you do not know many other men here tonight”
    “As a matter of fact, I am throwing myself on your mercy,” Cassandra answered, “as I do not wish to keep bothering Mrs. Langtry for introductions.”
    “There is no need for that,” the Duke said firmly. “I will look after you, and that is something at which I can assure you, without boasting, I am very proficient!”
    The dance-floor was even more crowded than when they had left it, but the Duke skilfully steered them round the room and Cassandra wondered how she had ever enjoyed dancing in the past.
    It was something quite different to be held in the Duke’s arms; to feel her hand in his and know the tulle trimming her décolletage brushed against the satin facing of his evening-coat.
    “You dance divinely!” he said. “Do you dance on the stage?”
    “I am a better ... actress,” Cassandra replied.
    The party was getting even noisier than it had been in the earlier part of the evening, and now as the dance came to an end the Band started up the loud gay music which heralded the Can-Can.
    “We will watch this,” the Duke said. “It is always amusing.” Cassandra had read in her father’s sporting papers of how the Can-Can had startled London some years before.
    Brought from Paris by a troupe consisting of two men and a girl, who were brothers and sister, they appeared at The Oxford Music Hall, and packed the place night after night.
    The Can-Can was considered the very height of impropriety and even The Sporting Times had some very scathing things to