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Then, with a deftness that spoke of a hundred such rescues, Lady Rosalind had a pin out of her own sleeve. She was down at the flounce and up again in the space of a breath, the torn piece caught and turned under and made decent before the room had so much as begun to look. Another quiet word set the girl to rights. The color came back into the small frightened face, and the child went off to her corner quite restored.

“Did you see how it was done?” Westcott said. “I was watching, and I hardly saw it.”

“I saw it.”

“Who is the child?” Dover asked.

“One of the Ashcombe cousins, I believe.” Westcott glanced at him sideways. “Why do you ask? It is not the child you were watching.”

She had very nearly managed it unseen. Very nearly. As she rose, she glanced across the press of the room and found him looking straight at her — not past her, as people always did, but at her, and she plainly knew he had watched from the very first stitch. He saw the stillness take her, a woman caught in the one sort of doing she kept out of anyone’s sight. Then the color came up her neck, and her hands folded themselves before her a half-second too late and a degree too careful, and she made her attention go back over the company. Even from across the room, it looked like work.

“You have stopped attending to me,” said Westcott. “I would resent it, only you have stopped attending to the soprano as well, so I cannot take it personally.”

Dover did not answer that either.

The soprano prepared to begin, and the usual small migration toward the chairs commenced, the usual quiet contest for the best seats, where one might be seen to be attending. The rooms, already too full, pressed in toward the music. Dover stayed at the edge of it all, his back near the wall by long habit, while the crowd moved past him.

Then a stout gentleman three places along discovered that his promised chair stood on the far side of the room. He turned to reach it, and the whole loose column of people by the wall shifted sideways at once to let him through.

She was in it. Carried a step she had not chosen, caught off her balance by a dowager’s elbow, she was about to go backwards into the card table behind her. Dover caught her by the arm before she struck it.

It lasted no longer than a breath. His fingers closed at her elbow through the wine-colored sleeve, held just long enough to be certain of her feet beneath her, and let go. A second, perhaps less. He had steadied a dozen people in a dozen crushes and thought nothing of any of them. His heart was beating a good deal faster than so small a service deserved.

He let his hand fall. The crush flowed on toward the chairs, leaving the two of them in a small accidental clearing by the wall, and the soprano began, mercifully, to sing, so that no one was looking at anyone but her.

“You are steady?” he asked. His voice came out lower than he had intended.

“Quite steady, I thank you.” She had recovered her composure faster than he had recovered his own. She stood with her hands folded once more, though a faint color at her cheek confessed that something had happened. “It was the crowd. One is always jostled at such evenings. You were very quick.”

A small pause followed.

“You were watching,” she said. “Before, I mean. When the girl tore her hem.” It was not a question.

“I was,” he replied.

He only looked at her and let it be true.

“Yes,” she murmured. She inclined her head, courteous and exact, and Dover had the distinct impression that she meant to end the conversation there.

He wished very much to keep her a moment longer and had not the smallest notion how it was to be done.

Then the difficulty resolved itself from a quarter he had not expected.

“Well, niece. I leave you to listen to the music for a quarter of an hour, and you contrive to be nearly tipped into the crowd.” Lady Holt had come up on Rosalind’s other side, quite unhurried, moving through the crush as though it had been arranged for her convenience. Her eye went from her niece to the tall man beside her and stayed upon him, frank and entirely unimpressed. Dover was not accustomed to being regarded so, and found upon the instant that he liked it.

“And I see you have been caught,” the old lady went on. “By Lord Dover, unless I am very much mistaken, which I am not, for I knew his mother. He has her exact way of looking at a room as though he is totting up what it owes him.”

“Lady Holt.” Dover bowed. “You have the advantage of me.”

“I generally do. It is the one comfort of being older than everyone I meet.” She let that sit a moment, the dryness landing just after it was said. “I am Lady Holt, and this is my niece, Lady Rosalind Hartley, who is in my charge this Season and is not in the habit of falling into card tables, whatever she may have told you. Rosalind, this is Lord Dover.”

Rosalind dropped a small curtsy, her eyes anywhere but his.

“There,” her aunt continued. “Now you are introduced, and you may go on talking with a clear conscience, which I perceive you were doing already, the pair of you, in defiance of all good form. I shall not tell a soul. I have no patience with form before the supper is served.”

“My aunt,” said Rosalind, with a steadiness that did not quite reach the color in her cheek, “is a great enemy of ceremony.”

“I am a great enemy of waiting about, which is nine-tenths of ceremony.” Augusta’s gaze went over Dover once more, unhurried, as a careful buyer goes over a horse she means to be certain of. Whatever she found appeared to content her, for the dryness softened by a degree. “You caught her quickly, my lord. That was very well done indeed. A great many men would have watched her go down and been exceedingly sorry about it afterward.”