“Yes. Quite right. It is the best of all my caps.” Aunt Harriet leaned her head against the velvet-upholstered wing of her chair. “I shall close my eyes for just a moment until tea. You must rouse me when the tray comes, Elizabeth.”

Maggie cast a bewildered look at Jane.

“Elizabeth is my mother,” Jane whispered, stifling a grin. “Did I not tell you my Aunt Harriet would be the best chaperone in the world?”

At promptly four o’clock, before the drawing room clock had even finished chiming the hour, St. Clare arrived in Green Street driving a dashing black curricle drawn by a pair of glossy, temperamental-looking match-bays. Maggie had been watching for him, and as he pulled up in front of the Trumbles’ townhouse, she hurried down the front steps to meet him.

At the sight of her, St. Clare ordered his tiger to go to the horses’ heads and jumped down from his curricle. “Miss Honeywell,” he said solemnly, making his bow.

“Lord St. Clare.”

He surveyed her fitted blue kerseymere pelisse and matching bonnet with an appreciative eye. “You look very well.”

“As do you.” And it was true. St. Clare’s figure was marvelously displayed, from the crown of his beaver hat to the mirror shine of his Hessians, and all the powerfully muscled, expertly tailored acreage in between.

He gave a sudden, slightly sheepish, grin. “I’d intended to come to the door and call for you properly.”

“Had you?” She was a little chagrined. Why had she run out to meet him so impetuously? So eagerly?

It was just the sort of thing she was used to do when Nicholas would call at the front entrance of Beasley Park, begging her company on a drive into town in the gig. “I’ve been charged with delivering these preserves to the vicarage,” he would say. “Pray come with me, Maggie, and lend me a bit of countenance.”

At the memory, Maggie felt the same sense of bewilderment and uncertainty that she’d felt when she read St. Clare’s note. “Well, it doesn’t matter, in any case. My chaperone, Miss Trumble’s Aunt Harriet, is fast asleep and you’ve already made the acquaintance of Miss Trumble herself. So there’s really no need to go inside. Unless…you don’t feel as if you must, do you?”

“No,” he answered after a moment. “As you say, there’s really no need.”

Maggie walked ahead of him to the curricle’s step and waited. When he stopped beside her and didn’t immediately offer his hand, she looked up at him inquiringly. And she had to look up, up, up, for he was infuriatingly tall. How had she not noticed before how diminutive she was when compared to him? She scarcely reached his shoulder!