“Couldn’t resist coming to pay our respects to Miss Trumble and Miss Honeywell,” Mattingly said.

“I’m obliged to you,” Trumble replied.

“We were just about to take our leave. I’m afraid we’ve been neglecting the ladies in our own box, haven’t we, St. Clare?”

“Whereabouts are you sitting?” Miss Trumble asked.

“Straight across the way. One tier above and a little to the right.”

Miss Trumble raised her opera glasses. “Oh! Is that Miss Steele I see? She’s quite the belle of the season, I understand.”

“Brought my sister, Astrid, too,” Mattingly said. “The young lady in the front. She’s fresh from the schoolroom, you know.”

“She’s lovely,” Miss Trumble responded graciously. She lowered her glasses. “It seems you have a bevy of young ladies waiting for you. How selfish of us to keep you as long as we have.”

“We won’t keep you any longer,” Trumble said.

St. Clare ignored him. His attention was riveted on Miss Honeywell, and unless he was very much mistaken, her attention was equally engaged with him. He reached for her gloved hand and she gave it to him willingly. He bowed over it, retaining it in his grasp a few seconds longer than was proper. “Until tomorrow, Miss Honeywell.”

She met his gaze. “I look forward to it, my lord.”

He reluctantly let her go, and after taking his leave of Miss Trumble and her brother, left the theater box with Mattingly close behind him.

The passage was crowded with people bustling about during the interval. St. Clare navigated through the crush, proceeding toward the stairway that would take them back up to their own box. At the first opportunity, Mattingly drew level with him. “The Honeybee,” he said.

“What?” St. Clare asked, distracted.

“That’s what Margaret Honeywell was called during her come out.” Mattingly chuckled. “Not at first, mind. When she first arrived, all the gents were calling her the Pocket Venus. You never saw a girl so beautiful. And with such a figure! She drew quite a court around her, too. Then the first chap got stung. And then the second.” Mattingly reflected on this with evident appreciation. “Used to deliver some of the sharpest set-downs you ever heard. Rather indecorous as well. Galloping her horse in Hyde Park. Firing a pistol during a country house party. And that temper of hers! More spleen than sense, Miss Honeywell.”

St. Clare listened to his friend’s words with avid attention, all the while wondering how to reconcile the picture Mattingly painted of a fiery, hoydenish hellion with the wan, quiet figure who had fainted into his arms in his library. An illness, her maid had said. What sort of an illness? And did she suffer from it still?

“Miss Honeywell doesn’t strike me as a temperamental sort of female,” he remarked absently.