As we approached the stairway, I gazed at the marble busts, the crystal lamps, and the antique tapestries. There were museums that didn’t have as much as this house, I thought. The wealth displayed along the walls and on them would take anyone’s breath away. I hadn’t been in a home this majestic. Garland didn’t rush me through it, either. I thought he was relishing the way I reacted, wide-eyed, to everything I was seeing.

“My father believed that Foxworth Hall could charm any woman more than any Foxworth man could. ‘Bring the woman you love here, and she will love you,’ he would tell me.”

“Was he right?” I asked coyly.

“I have yet to find out,” he replied. Few men I had met could hold their smile in the glint of their eyes as well as he could. Was he telling the truth? I doubted it, but I liked the fact that he wanted me to feel special.

“With all due respect to your father, a woman doesn’t marry a house,” I said.

“Maybe,” he replied. “You have yet to feel all its magic.”

We walked on, Mrs. Steiner remaining close behind as if she was there to catch whatever new request Garland tossed over his shoulders.

Before we reached the stairway, he nodded to his right. “That’s our library,” he said. He paused. “Turn up the lights a bit, please, Mrs. Steiner.”

She charged into the library and increased the illumination. Garland led me to the doorway, and I gazed at the walls lined with richly carved mahogany bookshelves crowded with leather-bound volumes. The ceiling was at least twenty feet high, the shelves of books almost meeting it. A slim portable stairway of wrought iron slid around a track curved to the second level of shelves, and there was a balcony from which someone could reach the books on the top level.

“I have something of an office in the rear. I can show you that later, perhaps in the daytime tomorrow if I can steal you away again. There’s a nice view of the property from the windows there.”

“It’s the most beautiful home library I’ve ever seen,” I said. “Have you read any of these books?”

He laughed. “One or two. I don’t sit still long enough these days to finish a book. Are you a reader?”

“Of volumes I like.”

“I’ll have to learn what those are and get more of them for you if they are not here now. You can spend hours checking titles, but many have to do with history and legal matters. It would take months to peruse all this. But I think you’d enjoy every day.”

I loved to hear him say things that foresaw a future for us, for me.