Page 18 of The Unlovable Lady

“It was well done,” said the young man at her shoulder, “and I shall go on saying so.” He looked about the table with an easy good humor. “I have been told there is no one here who will take a compliment. I call that a great waste of perfectly good compliments.”

Rosalind knew him for Charlotte’s brother before any name was given, for he had Charlotte’s coloring and none of her quickness — a broad, easy, good-humored young man who handed a kind word across as simply as another man might hand a chair. This, then, was Mr. Stephen Danforth, who had been making the kissing-bough, by the wire still caught about his cuff, and who had abandoned it to follow Phoebe’s swag down the table. That told Rosalind more about the afternoon than anything Phoebe had said.

“You are very free with your compliments, Mr. Danforth,” Phoebe said, and it came out almost teasing, almost brave. Then the old glance swung toward the fire, toward her mother, and found the doorway instead, where Cassandra had just come in, and the light went out of Phoebe’s face with the speed of long practice. “But I am sure it was only the wire holding, in the end, and not any knack of mine.”

“I am sure it was the knack,” said Mr. Danforth, quite untroubled, “for I have been tying greens since I was breeched, and mine fall apart to this hour.” He nodded at the swag in her hands. “You need not make it smaller than it was. It was well done, and there is an end of it.”

Phoebe looked at him as if she hardly knew what to do with such words, and for half a moment she did not glance up the room at all. She looked at the swag in her own hands, then at the plain warm face of the man who would not let her make it smaller, and something rose in her that was not careful in the least.

Then Cassandra’s voice carried down from the doorway, asking where Phoebe had got to, and the carefulness came back over Phoebe’s face at once. “I had better go, for Cassandra has arrived.” She went, holding the swag close against her, and the brightness went with her, and Rosalind watched her go.

Mr. Danforth had said the warm thing and had not taken it back. Phoebe had believed it. Then the glance had come, and the warmth had gone down again.

“You are watching Miss Phoebe,” Lord Dover said, low, at her side, “as closely as you watch everything else. As though you mean to remember every part of it.”

“I am watching the ivy, my lord. It is shorter than it was.”

“I know,” he said, and did not move from her side.

* * *

The carriages were being called for, and the parlor was emptying by degrees, and Rosalind had begun bundling the leftover greens into paper for the maids when Charlotte descended upon her and took the other end of the string.

“Now,” Charlotte said, winding the string about her hand. “We are going to talk about Lord Dover.”

“There is nothing to talk about. He sorted ivy very badly, and I corrected him.”

“He sorted four lengths in an hour. I counted. What did he say?”

“He said the Marchwood table was not luck.” Rosalind’s hands stilled on the parcel. “He says such things as though he means me to keep them.”

“And does that frighten you?”

“I have not the smallest business keeping anything of his. He is a viscount, Charlotte, and I am—” She pulled the knot tighter than it needed to be. “It does not matter.”

Charlotte took the parcel out of her hands. “I chose you first, you know. Before he ever stood at your elbow. I came to Wimpole Street certain I should waste an hour, and you were the most interesting person I had met in a Season.”

Rosalind’s throat tightened.

“That is very unfair of you.”

“I know.” Charlotte rose. “Come away. The carriage will be at the door by the time we reach it.”

* * *

Augusta’s house was warm and ordered when they returned, the candles lit and the fire made up, and Rosalind had got as far as the foot of the stairs, her bonnet-strings half undone, when she learned that Phoebe had come.

“I had a notion the younger Faulkner girl might be glad of an hour out from under her mother’s wing,” Augusta said, passing through the hall with the air of a woman who did not mean to be questioned. “I was right, for she came the moment she was asked. She is in the small parlor.” She paused at her own door, book in hand. “I shall be in the next room, within call, and I shall not hear a word, which is the great convenience of being old and presumed deaf.”

So Rosalind went into the small parlor, and found Phoebe sitting very upright on the edge of a chair, turning her glove between her fingers, with the look of a girl who had come on purpose and lost her nerve on the way.

“I hope you do not mind it,” Phoebe said at once, rising. “Lady Holt asked me, and I wanted to come.” She pressed the glove flat. “I do not often... that is, there is not often anywhere I am asked that Mama is not.”

“You are very welcome here.” Rosalind sat, and Phoebe sat with her, folding the glove smaller.

“I wanted to say something about this afternoon. The swags. You were very good to show me, and I did not thank you properly.”

“You thanked me very properly. It was only a swag.”