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wrong with Agnes. She had miscarried.
    â€œYour sister appeared to be glowing with good health when I saw her a few days ago,” he said. “I am sorry if my sudden appearance has alarmed you. I have no dire news of any kind. Indeed, I came to ask a question.”
    Dora clasped both hands at her waist and waited for him to continue. A day or two after the dinner at Middlebury last year he had come to the cottage with a few of the others to thank her for playing and to express thehope that she would do so again before their visit came to an end. It had not happened. Was he going to ask now? For this evening, perhaps?
    But that was not what happened.
    â€œI wondered, Miss Debbins,” he said, “if you might do me the great honor of marrying me.”
    Sometimes words were spoken and one heard them quite clearly, but as a series of separate, unconnected sounds rather than as phrases and sentences that conveyed meaning. One needed a little time in order to put the sounds together and understand what was being communicated.
    Dora heard his words, but for a few moments she did not comprehend their meaning. She merely stared and gripped her hands and thought, with a strange, foolish sort of disappointment, that he did not after all want her to play the harp or the pianoforte this evening.
    Only to marry her.
    What?
    He looked suddenly apologetic, and thereby resembled more the man she remembered from last year. “I have not made a marriage proposal since I was seventeen,” he said, “more than thirty years ago. But even with that fact as an excuse, I realize that this was a very lame effort. I have had ample time since leaving London to compose a pretty speech but have failed to do so. I have not even brought flowers or gone down upon bended knee. What a sad figure of a suitor you will think me, Miss Debbins.”
    â€œYou want me to marry you?” She indicated herselfwith a hand over her heart, as though the room was full of single ladies and she was unsure that he meant her rather than any of the others.
    He clasped his hands behind his back and sighed aloud. “You know about the wedding in London less than a week ago, of course,” he said. “You doubtless heard about the Survivors’ Club when we were all staying here at Middlebury Park last year. You would know about us from Flavian even if from no one else. We are very close friends. During the past two years all six of the others have married. After Imogen’s wedding was over last week and the last of my guests left my London home a few days ago, it occurred to me that I had been left behind. It occurred to me that . . . I was perhaps just a touch lonely.”
    Dora felt half robbed of breath. One did not expect a nobleman with his . . .
presence
either to experience such a lack in his life or to admit to it if he did. It was the last thing she would have expected him to say.
    â€œAnd it struck me,” he continued when she did not fill the short silence that succeeded his words, “that I really do not want to be lonely. Yet I cannot expect my friends, no matter how dear they are, to fill the void or to satisfy the hunger that is at the very core of my being. I would not even wish them to try. I could, however, hope for such a thing, even perhaps expect it, from a wife.”
    â€œBut—” She pressed her hand harder to her bosom. “But why
me
?”
    â€œI thought that perhaps you are a little lonely too, Miss Debbins,” he said, half smiling.
    She wished suddenly that she were sitting. Was this the impression she gave the world—that she was a lonely, pathetic spinster, still holding out the faint hope that some gentleman would be desperate enough to take her?
Desperate,
however, was not a word that could possibly describe the Duke of Stanbrook. He must be some years older than she, but he was still eminently eligible in every imaginable way. He could have almost any