It was Julia Ballinger who broke the minute's silence.

"I daresay Sir Oliver does not have his diary to hand, Mama. I am sure he will send us a card to say whether he is able to accept, if we allow him our address."

Margaret shot her a look of gratitude.

Rathbone smiled. "You are perfectly correct, Miss Julia. I am afraid I am not certain of my engagements a week ahead. My memory is not as exact as I should like, and I should be mortified to find I had offended someone by failing to attend an invitation I had already accepted. Or indeed that a case kept me overlong where I had foreseen it might..."

"Of course," Margaret said hastily.

But Mrs. Ballinger did not give up so easily. She produced a card from her reticule and passed it to him. It noted her name and address. "You are always welcome, Sir Oliver, even if you are not able to confirm beforehand. We are not so very formal as to admit only those we expect when an evening of social pleasure is to be enjoyed."

"Thank you, Mrs. Ballinger." He took the card and slipped it into his pocket. He was sufficiently annoyed with her insen-sitivity that he might even go, for Margaret's sake. Looking at her now, standing stiffly with her shoulders squared, horribly uncomfortable, and knowing this ritual would be observed until she was either successfully married or past marriageable age, she reminded him faintly of Hester Latterly, whom he had come to know in some ways so well in the last few years. There was a similar courage and vulnerability in her, an awareness of precisely what was going on, a contempt for it, and yet a knowledge that she was inevitably caught up in it and trapped.

Of course, Hester was not any longer similarly caught. She had broken free and gone to the Crimea to nurse with Florence Nightingale, and returned changed forever. It was her personal loss that both her parents had died in the tragedy which indirectly had brought about her meeting with William Monk, and thus with Rathbone. It had also spared her the otherwise inevitable round of parties, balls, soirees, and attendances at any conceivable kind of social occasion until her mother had found her an acceptable husband. Acceptable to her family, of course, not necessarily to her.