He had never been able to convince himself that he didn’t love her, but he had long ago given up any hope of seeing her again. Yet what difference did it make? She wasn’t married, but didn’t he know better than anyone that was most likely because she never would? He would be a fool to imagine that the outcome would be different if he asked her a second time. Misguided to imagine that she was here for any other reason than to accompany her mother. An idiot to read anything into the look they had exchanged as he took her hand.

Yet there had been something in that look.

Abruptly informing his cousins that the duchess would be joining them for tea, Donald cut short the conversation, heading to the front terrace. Somehow he was not surprised to see Margaret leaning out the window of the Blue Chamber with her chin cupped in her hands. Whatever she had been doing in New York, it suited her. She had always been lovely, but now she wore her more mature beauty with a quiet, understated confidence that he found extremely attractive.

He beckoned her to join him, and in a few short moments she was with him, still in her travelling gown but without her hat and gloves.

“I thought we could take a walk along the path by the river.”

“I can think of nothing I’d like more,” she answered, hesitating only a moment before slipping her hand into the crook of his arm. “You don’t mind my being here? I’m sorry it was such a shock.”

“It was, but a very nice one. I thought it was perfectly obvious that I was pleased to see you.”

“I’m so sorry if I embarrassed you by mentioning Miss Blair. For the last three years, you see, I’ve laboured under the misapprehension that you were married. I was glad when Julia wrote of it—well, I was glad eventually, once I had recovered from the shock—for I wanted so much for you to be happy.”

“I tried to be. We had a great deal in common, Helen and I. I thought if I could make her happy, then I would be happy, too, but it doesn’t work that way. Fortunately we both realised it in time.” Donald grimaced, recalling that painful conversation. “The betrothal was never formalised, but it was wrong of me, very wrong, to have allowed matters to have progressed as far as they did.”