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.He and she are enjoying each other.
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What is Romance?


Reading books RomanceReading books romantic stories you will plunge into the world of feelings and love. Most of the time the story ends happily. Very interesting and informative to read books historical romance novels to feel the atmosphere of that time.
In this genre the characters can be both real historical figures and the author's imagination. Thanks to such historical romantic novels, you can see another era through the eyes of eyewitnesses.
Critics will say that romance is too predictable. That if you know how it ends, there’s no point in reading it. Sorry, but no. It’s okay to choose between genres to get what you need from your books. But in romance the happy ending is a feature.It’s so romantic to describe the scene when you have found your True Love like in “fairytale love story.”




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Read books online » Romance » An Unknown Lover by Mrs George de Horne Vaizey (hardest books to read TXT) 📖

Book online «An Unknown Lover by Mrs George de Horne Vaizey (hardest books to read TXT) đŸ“–Â». Author Mrs George de Horne Vaizey



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work hard, and try to be of some use in the world. Perhaps some day, say on your next furlough, we may meet, if you still wish it, but in the meantime it would be better not to write. After what you have said, I should feel it unfair. The best thing you can do is to forget.

“Don’t think me unkind. It seems brutal to write so coldly, especially to-day, when I have just received a letter from Captain Bedford in Egypt, and with it the most wonderful old brass tray—quite the finest specimen of its kind that I have seen. He explains that it is your commission, and sends me quite a genealogical tree of its history. From his letter he sounds a charming man. He says he returns in March. If I had been coming out, we might have travelled by the same boat...

“Oh, Jim, I wish I could come—I wish I could! It’s hard work looking on, and feeling eternally number three. Do you think I don’t want to love too, and to be loved? Do you think it is easy to say ‘no,’ and throw away the chance? If only I could think it right! It is not pride which is hindering me, truly it isn’t, it is more like cowardice. We have defied convention, and as a result have created an impossible situation, and I shrink from the probable pain and disillusion of a meeting in the flesh. Your letters have meant a great deal to me; I don’t know how I should have come through the last few months without them. For my own sake I should not regret the episode, but it has been hard on you. At the bottom of my heart I guessed all along that it would lead to this. I pretended that I did not, and deliberately shut my eyes, and now I must pay up. I care for you too much to run any more risks. I won’t write again, and please don’t answer this. You will hear of my doings through Dorothea, and I shall always care to hear about you; so it is not like saying good-bye.

“Don’t be angry with me, I’m very miserable!

“Katrine.”

“Lebong, December 10, 19—.

“Katrine,

“I’m not angry, dear girl—but you’ve got to come! Every word that you write only makes me the more fixed in my determination. I can understand your shyness and your pride, but I’m hanged if I can understand all this business about disillusion and humiliation. If you find on investigation that I’m not the man for you, I shall regret it, but I shall feel no humiliation. Why should I? The fact that I do not please your taste, makes me no less a man, nor worthy of esteem. If—by a strength of imagination—I were disappointed in you, the situation would, I admit, be more charged, but being ‘only a man,’ I emphatically deny your assertion that the sentiment which you have evoked could be evaporated by any outward feature or trait. My dream woman is very dear, but, have no delusions on the point—she is not perfect! I have created for myself no plaster saint. You have plenty of faults, my dear, but there is this big difference between them, and those of any woman in existence—they are Katrine’s faults!

“I have given my word to speak no word beyond those of friendship for three months after your arrival. If you then decide that I am impossible as a husband, you need fear no unpleasantness. I’ll clear out, exchange into another regiment, apply for leave. You shan’t be troubled. After that three months’ trial, I’ll take your answer as final, and leave you in peace. I’ve no desire to badger a woman into being my wife. But I demand my chance!

“I think you will come, Katrine. Putting myself out of the question, I think you will come, and I’ll tell you why. It would be rank selfishness on your part to stay in England for the present! Martin has had a rough time of it, but life is opening out for him afresh, and if you love him you won’t stand in his way. How do you suppose he will feel if you are wandering about from boarding-house to boarding-house, or working among strangers? The thought of you will be a continuous shadow over his sun, and that’s what you have no right to be, if there is any legitimate way of avoiding it. Real happiness is a rare thing, it is holy ground, which ought to be sacred from our touch. I’d as soon cut off my right hand as cloud a man’s joy in his new-made wife.

“And after Martin there’s Dorothea.

“It’s not a lively life for a woman in a small hill station. It grows monotonous, meeting year after year the same people. Dorothea’s a brave woman, but the life tells. The boy is delicate also. There’s a talk of sending him home to his grandmother. Dorothea won’t leave Middleton; she considers that he needs her more than the child, and I think she is right, but it will be a pill. There’s nothing on earth which could cheer and help her more than a visit from you. She has written to you again I know. This time you must not refuse. The climate up here is quite reasonable. You will have no great heat to face.

“And so, dear, I think you will come! I know you will come, and, God willing, you shall not regret it.

“That’s a good idea about Bedford! He’s a capital chap, and would look after you well. We must see that that comes off. He will stay in Egypt till the last moment, I fancy, and join the ship at Port Said, but, you’d still have ten days together, and he would be useful on landing. He is a good thirty-five, staid, and level-headed. It’s quite conventional, I suppose? I never know about these things. Book your passage in good time, and cheer Dorothea by the news. Write at once, no! in my present state of health I don’t feel up to waiting five whole weeks. I have not been fit—feverish, sleepless—so am not in the mood for patience. Cable just one word—the name of the steamer—to our code address. When I read that I’ll know that your passage is booked.

“Oh, my Katrine—sorry! I’ll be more careful—

“Yours,

“J.C.D. Blair.”

Cable message from Katrine Beverley to Dorothea Middleton: “Accept invitation. Sail by Bremen.”

Chapter Sixteen.

“Cumly, January 2, 19—.

“Dear Autocrat,

“I We done it! I’ve given in, and sent off the cable. By now you will have seen it, and be either chortling with triumph, or wishing remorsefully that you’d left well alone. I hope it’s the former, because, to be candid, I’m chortling myself. Oh, I’m so glad! I wanted so badly to say ‘yes.’ It was clever of you to make it appear so clearly my duty to do just the one thing I wanted above all others!

“Hurrah! For a whole year I am free. The office, the surgery, the kitchen, and the stage, can retire gracefully into the background. I’m going out to India with a box full of new clothes, to stay with my dearest friend, and have a good time. Inadvertently also to meet a nice man...

“Oh, Jim, I hope you are nice—my kind of nice! I hope, hope, hope with all my heart that I shall tumble right in love with you the moment we meet, and that you’ll do ditto with me, and that we’ll go on tumbling all our lives.

“I’ve no pride left this morning; I’m so excited and glad. Martin put his arm round me on Wednesday when I told him of my cable, and swung me off my feet. ‘Now everything is perfect!’ he said. ‘You will be happy as well as I.’ And he has been so dear and generous, insisting that he owes me no end of money for my work for him, and I have been to town to buy clothes, Lonely Man, scrumptious clothes, with Grizel to help, because I should like—Dorothea—to see me look nice!

“Grizel is the most bracing person to shop with. When you think it’s extravagant, she calls it cheap, and when you are wondering if you dare have one, she orders a dozen, and just for once in a way, when you’ve been careful all your life, it is lovely to go a bust. Besides—

“My bridesmaid’s kit is Grizel’s present, and seems stretching to immense proportions. A dress for the ceremony, and a dress for the evening, and a hat and a cloak, and fal-lals of every description. Do you think the regiment will give some function to let me show them off? Now that my own future no longer casts its shadow over the whole landscape, I am immensely enjoying the engaged couple. They are so deliriously gay and young, and happy and hopeful; and the nice part about it is—it is going to last! I feel sure it will, for through his long experience of sorrow and loss Martin has learned how to give the one all-important thing that is necessary to a woman’s happiness. Have you the slightest idea what it is? You will smile at the sentiment of women, and say ‘Love, of course,’ but it isn’t love, at least it is not necessarily included in that term. Many a man honestly loves his wife, and yet succeeds in making her miserable. No! it is just a simple, homely quality without which the grandest of passions is incomplete! Tenderness! Tenderness means kindness and understanding, and sympathy, and imagination, and patience—above all, patience! When a man is in love he thinks a woman perfect, but she isn’t, she is an irrational, inconsequent creature, whose mate will have need of patience every day of his life, and sometimes many times a day. Of course there do exist female paragons, calm, correct creatures, with smooth hair and chiselled features, who are always serene and self-contained, but then they are also independent of tenderness. This grows complicated! I’d better drop pretence and confess at once that when I talk generalities I really mean You and Me, the two people who are at the back of all generalities!

“I am erratic and variable... On Tuesday, for no tangible cause, I feel bubbling over with happiness; on Wednesday, for an equally logical reason, I crave for death. On occasions I can be exasperatingly contrary. I know it all the time, and am furious with myself, but that only makes me worse! On after reflection I either pray and fast, or in brazen fashion excuse myself on the score of electric influences! After all, why shouldn’t I? We are the most sensitive of machines, and if climatic disturbances affect the wires at a distance of thousands of miles, why should We pass unscathed? I sometimes think we are too hard on our own moods and tempers, but they are trying enough in any case for the other person. The question of the hour is this—Could You be tender to Me???

“Only four weeks and I’m off! It will be more convenient for me to leave directly after the wedding, and if ’twere done, ’twere well done quickly. Grizel’s trousseau is reaching the acute stage, and I thought I was busy enough helping her, without starting a second on my—

“What am I saying! I must be mad. You understand that I trust to that three months’ truce, and that I promise nothing—nothing. I only hope!

“Au revoir, Jim. To-morrow I shall be tearing my hair for writing all this, but the mail will have gone... It will be too late.

“Katrine.

“P.S. A happy new year, Jim, Will it be happy?”

Chapter Seventeen.

“Cumly, January 7, 19—.

“Dear Captain Blair,

“This follows quickly to retract everything that I said last week! If I had not already spent so much on cables, and if it were not so difficult to explain, I should have sent a flying order to

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