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...?” Lady Leonora prodded, some life and animation coming into her eyes.
    “And,” Annabelle said calmly, “he said he hadn’t the slightest idea, nor did it matter. ‘For it’s only more of the same,’ he said, ‘and only what I’ve come to expect from her. And Severne is a grown man,’ he said, ‘and well used to slings and arrows.’ Then he left for the day, for his club, he said.”
    “Ah,” Lady Leonora breathed, as all energy and color fled from her face, “but that is even worse.”
    She sat with her eyes closed a moment and then opened them and met her cousin’s wide blue and uncomprehending stare. “It would have been better to have been scolded,” she explained softly. “Even a sound thrashing would feel better, I think, than that cold disappointed resignation of his does. But you don’t understand, do you Belle? I suppose it’s because you lost your father so young. And I, on the other hand, lost mine so late. No, don’t look so shocked. I know he still lives, silly, and a long life I wish to him, too. But I lost him long ago, you see. No, you don’t.” The lady sighed. “Well, no matter.”
    She rose and seemed to give herself a little shake, and then turned a singularly gentle smile upon her cousin.
    “The light blue frock,” she commented in a brighter tone, and with evident approval as she inspected the other girl as she too stood up. “Now if you go and get your figured rose wrap, the new one we picked out at the Pantheon Bazaar last week, and your biscuit-colored bonnet with the rosebuds on it, you’ll do very nicely. Then we’ll go off to the booksellers, and have a long stroll while we’re about it, so that we may meet up with some of the young gentlemen you were too unsure to say boo to last night. We shall make a social success of you yet, my fair and timid lady. And then,” she added with a wry grin, as much to her cousin as to her herself, “I can go home and live content, with no one to scandalize but the geese.”
    “But you haven’t had your breakfast,” Annabelle protested as her relative ordered her to the door.
    “No,” Lady Leonora said as she shooed her cousin off down the hall to her own room, “but then, I don’t deserve one.”
    As she watched Annabelle obediently leave to fetch her wrap and bonnet from her room, which Mama had insisted on being located in that netherland somewhere between the servants’ quarters and the best guest rooms, Lady Leonora sighed again. It had been useless to argue that Annabelle ought to have accommodations as fine as her own, for Mama had steadfastly insisted that impoverished distant cousins do not belong in, or feel comfortable when being accommodated in, lavishly appointed bedchambers. But then, Leonora thought as she turned to go back to her own bedchamber to await Annabelle, Mama did not understand that the only reason her daughter had agreed to return to London after all this while was so that she might see to that same impoverished distant relative’s future.
    She had been happy enough, she thought, as she went to her wardrobe to get out her own wrap, to live quietly in the peace of the countryside and watch the seasons turn and listen to her birthdays tick away. Not “happy” precisely, she frowned now to herself, for she was a stickler for honesty, even when only arguing with herself, but content No, not that either exactly, she thought, but living on all those acres in the North, so far from London and society and past shame, had numbed her nicely.
    There was society in the countryside, of course, but not precisely suitable for young, wealthy, nubile noblewomen. And so of course, rather than going to London again, she was resigned—yes, she smiled to herself, there was the exact word, “resigned”—to stay at home and wait until she was old enough to properly sink into the local whirl of matrons’ teas, church bazaars, and charity work without a ripple.
    There were gentlemen in the North too, of