Major Sturgeon, on the other hand, was to have behaved with considerably more circumspection, no doubt because her imagination had matured a few degrees by the time she grew out of her teens. He would have seen her across the room at a London ball, having pined in silence for many years. But now, at the sight of her, he could no longer contain his feelings. He would write her a sonnet and send it anonymously. It would be full of remorse and regret, and he would stand in the rain outside her house and stare for hours at the door. She thought perhaps he would finally find a way to come into her path and beg to call on her, only in a rather more tender and miserable tone of voice than he had used in the Antlers' parlor, rather than sounding as if he would like to call her out.

In perfect honesty, she would have been quite content to leave these reveries safely in her head and omit any actual experience of them. Instead of Trev, it was Major Sturgeon who seemed to be assuming the role of brooding corsair, which was disconcerting in the extreme. She had no inkling of why he could possibly wish to call upon her. Their betrothal had been broken off through the medium of a letter, with no specific reason given but that he felt himself unworthy of her hand. Since he had shortly thereafter felt himself worthy to become engaged to another woman, she drew the obvious conclusion that she had not satisfied his requirements in a wife. Her father had been of a mind to forcibly alter Major Sturgeon's decision on the matter but submitted when Callie begged him not to do so. She had no desire, she told her papa, to marry any gentleman who did not wish to marry her.

It had all been very unpleasant and mortifying from start to finish. She recalled very little about Major Sturgeon himself, as she had only met him when he was on brief leave from Paris, and once again after Waterloo, and hardly spoken to him during the few times they were in company. He was quite a hand some man, very firm of jaw and military in his bearing, always in uniform when she had seen him. That was why she had recognized him after so long. Very few active officers in full dress crossed her path—none, to be precise—and she quite clearly remembered the imposing stiffness of his braids and shoulder epaulets. But there was a certain swashbuckling air about him now, in all his scarlet and gold, a resolute sweep in the way he removed his cloak. The intense manner in which he looked at her was unnerving.