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“I say it because it is true. So you will forgive me if I put no great faith in a county’s certainty, nor a countess’s, nor a quiet man’s at a window. I have seen too many of them proved wrong.”

The carriage turned into Wimpole Street. Rosalind made no answer.

Her mind returned instead to a man who had given back her hand a half-second later than he ought, and to the moment in the broken set that she had wished would last.

A fortnight, she thought, as the carriage rocked to a stop. Very well, Aunt. I shall try. A fortnight of not being certain.

Chapter Nine

The Harcourts’ ballroom was a great deal too warm by ten o’clock, and Lord Dover had taken up his usual place before the long pier-glass, where a man might see the whole room without appearing to look at any of it.

Lady Rosalind had entered half an hour ago, wearing a gown the color of bronze, and she stood now across the floor by the card-room door. Since the moment she came in, he had not once truly looked away. She does not know that I am watching her. The thought pleased him a good deal more than he cared to admit. When had one lady become the only thing in a room worth watching?

“You have the look of a man composing poetry and ashamed of it,” said Westcott, arriving at his shoulder with a glass of his own. “I shall not ask what has inspired you.”

“That is wise of you.”

“Your claret has gone warm in your hand this quarter-hour. Drink it, man.”

“You are in great charity with the world tonight.”

“I am in charity with the claret, and the world must wait its turn.” Westcott followed the line of his friend’s gaze without the smallest attempt at subtlety. “Ah! Yes. Now I see what has been holding your attention.”

“Nothing has been holding my attention.”

“Has it not?” Westcott laughed. “You have given me three words together since I came up, Dover, and it is the one sign you give, is it not? You grow short of speech the very moment something has truly reached you.”

Dover drank his claret and made no answer. Across the room, Rosalind had bent toward an elderly lady upon a sofa, shifting a cushion and finding a footstool, and she had stepped quietly back into the crowd before any thanks could reach her. Dover found that he was smiling before he knew he had begun.

“Dover.” Westcott set his glass upon the ledge of the pier-glass, and something in his voice changed. “Look about you a moment. Not at her. About. Tell me what you see.”

It was the one instruction Dover had never been able to refuse. He looked about the room, and his heart gave a slow, unwelcome thud.

The room had begun to watch him.

He could not have proven it to a magistrate, yet there was no mistaking it. A fan tilted toward a neighbor, and a glance traveled over it, first to him, then to the card-room door, then back again. A dowager shaped a word to the dowager beside her, while a young gentleman he half knew sent him a look of rueful congratulation, as one gives a fellow who has been caught at last.

The whisper ran beneath the music, from him to her and back again, and the room had already reached its verdict. The viscount and the Marbury girl.

His stomach tightened. So it had happened, then, and he had not even felt it happening. Was this what it was to be caught?

“There it is,” Westcott said, softly. “You have been seen, my friend. The man who watches everything has begun to watch one woman, and I am sure half of Cavendish Square has noticed it.”

“They are curious, nothing more.”

“Curious, yes, and not cruel, I grant you. Who is she, then? Marbury’s daughter, the one nobody knew?” Westcott spread his hand. “But the room is talking, and it will not stop talking. You put yourself in the middle of it when you stood up with her at the Glanvilles’ and danced a set and did not dance another.”

“I danced one set. A man may dance a set.”

“A man may. You may not.” Westcott shook his head. “You have not stood up with a lady these two years without the room making a note of it, for you are a viscount, and your interest is a thing people place wagers upon. Did you not know that?”

“I knew it.”

“Then you know what they saw. One set with a girl nobody could place, and then a whole evening spent so carefully not looking at her that you might as well have stood upon a chair and announced yourself.”

“You are enjoying this,” Dover said.

“A little, I confess.” Westcott took up his glass again. “But I am not scolding you. I am telling you the shape of the thing, for you taught me long ago that a man should know the shape of a thing before he decides what to do about it.”