Love in the Dark by Barbara Cartland

Although her vast inheritance from her Godmother seemed to be blessing, it has become a curse now that Susanna Laven’s pushy mother is determined to marry her against her will to the impoverished Duke of Southampton.  What is worse, as her mother repeatedly and cruelly tells her, she is the family’s ‘ugly duckling’ and her only attraction is her large fortune! She is too fat from eating comfort sweets and makes no effort to even try to be pretty. 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. Fyfe 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 the position and soon finds herself on a luxury train speeding across France on its journey to the enchanting City of Florence. There Susanna’s eyes are opened to the glories of Florence – and love!  She had prayed every night 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 Fyfe Dunblane’s eyes are healed and he sees that she is not the beauty of his mind’s eye! Love in the Dark is the story of a man and a woman being blind in different ways – and of how love turns an ugly duckling into a swan without her even realising it!