The Saint and the Sinner by Barbara Cartland Page A

expected to find myself lonely and unwanted tonight,” Sir Gilbert was saying, “but instead I know that I shall be entranced and delighted in a manner which makes me excited even to think of it.”
    His face was very near to hers and Pandora took a step backwards.
    She hoped he would not be sitting next to her at dinner, but she found to her dismay that he was on her left, although she was relieved to find that the Earl was on her right.
    Kitty was on their host’s other side and monopolised him by making him laugh and whispering in his ear in a manner which Pandora knew would never have happened at her mother’s dining-table.
    So she was forced, whether she liked it or not, to talk to Sir Gilbert, and he made the most of it.
    “You are very lovely!” he said. “Your eyes are a complete contrast to your hair, and they really are purple in the candlelight.”
    He paused before he asked in an insinuating manner,
    “Can I make them glow with the fires of desire?”
    “That sounds like an extract from the sort of novel you would not find in this Library,” Pandora said coldly.
    “Are you being provocative or merely unkind?” Sir Gilbert enquired.
    “I think really such questions make me feel uncomfortable,” Pandora answered.
    She told herself she was not afraid of him, that she just found him a bore. She would much rather look round and think how wonderful it was to be back in the huge Dining-Room where her grandfather and grandmother used to entertain when she was a little girl.
    There had not been many parties after her Uncle George was killed at Waterloo.
    After her grandmother died, her grandfather had sat alone at the end of the long table where the Earl was sitting now and old Burrows had laid out the family silver.
    He would polish it with his rheumatic hands, but it reflected not guests but only the coats-of-arms embroidered on the empty chairs.
    “How many men have made love to you?” Sir Gilbert was murmuring against Pandora’s ear.
    “No-one has made love to me!” Pandora replied firmly. “And I would much rather talk about horses. Do you keep many, Sir Gilbert?”
    He laughed as if he was amused by her attempt to evade him.
    “At the moment I am only interested in one particularly attractive little filly,” he answered, “who has not yet been broken to the bridle. May I say that is something I shall greatly enjoy doing?”
    “I do not understand what you are saying,” Pandora replied.
    She was glad when Sir Gilbert’s conversation was interrupted by the footmen offering dishes that she realised were not only delicious but different from anything she had eaten before.
    Her mother had taught her to cook and Pandora tried to guess the ingredients that had gone into the sauce with the tenderloin of veal.
    She wondered if it would be possible to meet the Chef before she left Chart Hall and ask him for some of his recipes.
    There was no hope of improving the dull, stodgy fare that her aunt ordered at the Palace, but perhaps one day she would be able to cook for someone who thought good food was an art, as her father had done.
    “I was telling you,” Sir Gilbert said in a purring tone which she told herself she disliked, “how much I long to kiss you and to teach you, my wild, unbroken filly, about love.”
    He really was becoming rather tiresome, Pandora thought, and besides, he had had too much to drink.
    In fact, as the meal came to an end, looking round the Dining-Room she was quite certain that the majority of the gentlemen were what her father would have called “foxed.”
    They were all rather red in the face and had a “swimmy” look in their eyes, which reminded her uncomfortably of the manner in which Prosper Witheridge looked at her.
    Their high cravats were creased and some of them had undone their waist-coats, which she thought was a shocking breach of good manners.
    The women too seemed to have got noisier, and their voices were more shrill.
    By the time the dessert was being