104. A heart finds love

The beautiful Alnina Lester is confronted with a formidable task when her brother, Lord Lester, dies after fighting a duel in Paris. She finds that he has accumulated an enormous number of debts, and to meet his creditors everything in their house, which has been in the Lester family for generations, has to be sold. Even though she has sold a great number of treasures, she is still short of money. Alnina goes round the house to see what else she can find to sell. In her mother's bedroom she sees her extraordinary and unusual wedding dress, which her father had found in China. Exquisitely embroidered, it was decorated with diamante and many precious stones. She decides she would ask what seems to her a very large sum for it and advertises it in The Times. The advertisement is seen by the Duke of Burlingford, who is planning to visit Prince Vladimir Petrov in Georgia with his friend William Armstrong. They had been there several years earlier and found gold in one of the tall mountains of the Caucasus before the Duke through two unexpected deaths, succeeded to his title. William warns him that Prince Vladimir is determined to marry his daughter to an English Nobleman and it would therefore be dangerous for him to visit Tiflis in case he was forced by some means or other up the aisle with the Princess. How the Duke concocts a plan and answers the advertisement for the wedding dress. How he finds that Alnina can speak Russian fluently. And how he begs her to go out with him to Tiflis and then encounters a different danger but a very menacing one that leads them both eventually to their hearts' desire is all told in this intriguing adventure by BARBARA CARTLAND.