202. Love in the Dark

Although her vast inheritance seemed a blessing, it has become a curse now that Susanna Laven’s mother is determined to marry her against her will to the impoverished Duke of Southampton. What’s worse that as her mother repeatedly and cruelly tells her, she is the family’s “ugly duckling” her only attraction is her fortune! Desperate to escape a loveless marriage, she responds to an advertisement for a reader in French and Italian for a temporarily blind gentleman. Meeting the gentleman, a Mr. Dunblane, who is swathed head to toe in bandages after a terrible motor car accident, she finds him rude and short-tempered, but still accepts and soon finds herself on a luxury train speeding across France on its journey to Florence. There Susanna’s eyes are opened to the glories of Florence – and love! to She had prayed to God to give her love, and in the blossoming relationship with her blind employer, who himself seems entranced by her, she may have found it. But it’s an agony, not a joy – for surely it will end the moment Mr Dunblane’s eyes are healed and he sees that she is not the beauty of his mind’s eye’s vision! Love in the Dark is the story of two people being blind in different ways – and of how love turns an ugly duckling into a swan with her evening knowing!