Page 28 of The Unlovable Lady

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A quieter set was forming at the far end of the long room, and Dover, having no wish to dance and still less to stand within reach of Lady Marbury’s smile, took up a station beside a bank of greenery where a man might be private in plain sight. He had not gone in search of what he saw there, but he was glad, on the whole, to have found it.

Mr. Danforth was asking Miss Phoebe Faulkner to dance, and Miss Phoebe was saying yes.

He knew them both a little. Danforth was Charlotte’s brother, an open, comfortable, plain-spoken young gentleman with nothing guarded about him at all. Miss Phoebe was the younger Faulkner daughter, the quiet one, who stood half a pace behind her mother in every room.

He had marked her habit weeks ago. She would let some warm thing begin to rise in her face, then glance toward her mother or her sister, asking silently whether she was permitted it, and finding no permission there, she would put the warm thing away again. He had thought it a pity every time he saw it.

She did not do it now.

Danforth said something Dover could not hear, and her whole face came up to meet it. Her hand went out to take his arm without a moment’s pause. She did not glance toward the second window where her mother stood, nor look about for her sister. She simply went to the set with her face still bright, and the little asking look Dover had seen her make a dozen times never came at all.

How strange, that a man could be moved by the absence of a thing. Yet he was. What had Danforth done that a whole family had never managed?

The set formed, and twice the dance carried Danforth into a touch the figure did not require. A steadying hand at her elbow, held there a half-second longer than any accident allows. A turn that brought her hand near his, taken a beat before the music asked for it, and not minding in the least who saw.

And Miss Phoebe, who flinched from her own warmth in every other room in London, let her hand be taken and did not pull it back. It was the truest thing Dover had seen all evening, only warmth offered simply and met without a flinch, and a girl who in that one man’s company had stopped asking the room’s leave to be glad.

Danforth spoke again as the set brought them back together, and she laughed. It was an easy, unguarded laugh, never once checked toward the window, and she answered him with her chin up and her hands quiet. She was braver in the middle of a crowded floor with that one open-faced young man than Dover had ever seen her be while standing safely at her mother’s side.

If that quiet girl can be brave under a hundred candles, he thought, then what excuse have I?

He was glad of it, and he let it be.

“You were seen tonight,” said Westcott, appearing at the edge of the greenery. “The whole room has joined your name to hers, and you could not walk out of it clean now if you tried. You had best decide soon whether you mean to court her in earnest, had you not? The room has decided for you already.”

“So it seems.”

“Come and lose to me before supper. You may settle the rest tomorrow.”

Dover went with him toward the card-room.

Let them talk, he thought, as the card-room closed the music away behind him. I do not wish to take it back. Whatever it may cost me, I do not.

Chapter Ten

Rosalind slipped through the gallery doors into the Ainsworths’ conservatory, hunting among the orange-trees for the box of counters the card-room had sent for. The footman sent to fetch it had never come back, and she could not stand in a doorway watching a difficulty without mending it.

There it sat upon a marble ledge. The gallery doors stood open behind her, and Augusta sat not twenty feet away with a dish of negus, so it was all perfectly proper.

“You have found their oranges,” said a voice behind her.

Her heart leapt into her throat, for Lord Dover had followed her in. How long had he been standing there?

“I have found their counters,” she replied, keeping her back to him while she squared the box upon the ledge, moving it an inch one way and an inch back as though it needed adjusting. Such a small fuss gave her away entirely, and she knew it. “The card-room wanted them. It is a very fine conservatory, is it not?”

“Very fine indeed.”

“Though they keep it too warm for the oranges and exactly right for the company, which is quite the wrong way round.”

“So it is, though no one asks the oranges.” He had come no nearer than the second tree. “I did not follow you for the oranges.”

She turned then, since honesty allowed her nothing else. He stood in the green light with his hands behind his back, wearing the still look she had come to know, the look that meant he had a thing to say and was deciding how much of it she would allow. Her breath caught. What does he mean to say to me?

“Lord Dover,” she began, but he shook his head.

“At the Glanvilles’, in the set, I began a thing I did not finish. You will remember there was a great deal of holly between us, and then your aunt arrived with the rest of it.”