Now, though, with the end of cub hunting and the true season about to begin, Lady Shelford seemed to have enticed half the nobility to what she fondly referred to as her family's ancestral seat. Callie tried not to feel offended by this description of Shelford Hall. It was true of course that the property now belonged to Cousin Jasper, and thus to his wife, and eventually to their eldest son, though an heir had not yet been produced. Indeed, the Taillefaires did not seem prolific of sons in their recent generations. Callie's own father had outlived three wives without procuring a boy for his trouble—and trouble it had been, from what Callie recalled. Once he had even said to her, with some anguish, that he would have been glad to leave her the whole if he might, for she was as fine a successor as any man could hope for, and then he could have done without these plaguey women upsetting everything with their vapors.

Callie had smiled at that but never allowed herself to lose sight of the fact that she would be leaving Shelford Hall. If there had been more fond ness between them, she might have remained as a companion to Lady Shelford, one of those maiden aunts who made conversation over the needlework and doted on the children, but no one had ever contemplated that notion for more than an instant. In truth, if Callie must dote on someone else's offspring, she preferred her sister's, or even Major Sturgeon's, for that matter. The changed atmosphere at Shelford was already painful enough.

This evening it was a formal dinner party large enough to fill the entire long table in the dining room. Callie partook of the extravagant meal with stiff care, dreading to make some faux pas that would draw Dolly's attention to her. She impressed her dinner partner—some viscount or other—only with her silence. Amid the murmur of conversation, the candles and glitter of silver and diamonds, she indulged herself in imagining a dining salle in Paris, with the conversation all in French, and herself the enchanting new bride of a duke—nameless, of course, but resembling Trev in every particular. Somewhere in her fantasy all the guests mysteriously vanished and he drew her up a gilded staircase to a bed that rather resembled the entire city of Byzantium, kissing her hands and then—

"Lady Callista?" Her dinner partner was standing, waiting to pull out her chair. Perforce, she took his arm and joined the guests in the drawing room.