Page 22 of The Unlovable Lady

“You are very free with your reading of me.”

“I am not free at all. I am exact.” She held his eyes, color standing high in her cheeks. “You told me so yourself.”

He had no answer ready. That unsettled him, and stranger still, pleased him.

The new player had begun, something soft and slow that asked nothing of the room, so that the talk dropped beneath it and rose again. Cups were going round now, while somewhere nearby Mr. Layton’s lost rhythm was being explained to him by someone who ought to have known better. Rosalind reached, by long habit, for a cup that needed carrying to one of the mothers by the fire.

“I have kept you from the music long enough,” she said, the work taking her hand as it always did. “It was nothing, the tea-table. Anyone might have managed Miss Faulkner. You need not make a thing of it.”

There it was again, the good thing she had done handed away before any thanks could land on her. Ordinarily he would have stopped her.

This time his answer came late and wrong.

“No,” he said. “I daresay anyone might.”

Her step checked on the way to the fire, only half a pace, and then she went on with the cup steady in her hand.

Dover knew at once that he had misjudged it. He had meant not to make too much of the moment and had made too little.

I should have named her.

* * *

White’s at that hour ought to have been the cure for it. Dover found Westcott in the card-room and lost forty pounds to him over talk that signified nothing.

“Out with it,” Westcott said at last, gathering the cards. “You have lost to me all evening with the air of a man paying for a service.”

Dover turned a card without seeing it. “There is the aunt. Lady Holt.”

“What of her?”

“She is easy with everyone in a room. Then Lord Marbury comes near certain subjects, and she turns cold.”

Westcott set the deck down. “You think something is unsaid.”

“I think there may be.”

“Leave it unsaid.”

“I mean to.”

“Good. If Lady Rosalind wants you to know it, she will tell you.”

“And if she never does?”

“Then you live without the knowing.” Westcott picked up the deck again. “There. I have done being wise for the evening. It is bad for my reputation. Pick up your cards.”

Dover picked them up, though instead of his cards he saw a hand held out across a warm room, left uncaught.

Not again, he vowed. The next kindness she tries to hand away to nobody, I shall catch it, and I shall name her.

Chapter Eight

The Glanvilles had given over their whole ground floor to the ball, and by the time Rosalind surrendered her cloak, most of the work was done. A swag sagged over the supper-table, the draft from the garden door guttered two candles in the hall, and a side-table of greenery stood in a muddle.

Her heart lifted at the sight.

“You have that look,” Augusta remarked beside her, drawing off her gloves. “I know that look very well indeed.”