“Eh? What is it? Robbers?” The marquis sat up, his hair falling ludicrously over one eye. Eloise almost gasped in surprise. Had George grown old then, behind her back, as it were? His dark hair was speckled with white. He looked like a tired old man, peering at her blurrily. But his legs were still strong and muscled as he swung them out of bed and grabbed a robe. It seemed that George still slept without a nightshirt.

Eloise followed him out the door almost wistfully. The memory of the first few months of their marriage was hardly dimmed by the intervening twenty years. How much fun it had been when the marquis—George—had twinkled at her from the doorway connecting their rooms and strode into bed, naked as the day he was born.

Nostalgia, however, was the last thing on George’s mind as he charged down the front stairs. He was barreling toward the back garden when Carroll caught him by the elbow.

“My lord.” Something in Carroll’s tone chilled George’s blood. “The ladder has addressed itself to the window of the young lady’s chamber, my lord.”

“The ladder has addressed itself,” George repeated, puzzling over it. “Addressed itself? Why the hell can’t you speak English like the rest of the human race, Carroll?”

Carroll restrained a retort along the lines of a reminder of his French nationality, and simply said, stolidly, “The top of the ladder is leaning into Lady Sophie’s bedroom, my lord. And,” he added with some satisfaction, “her window is open.”

George gaped at him. “Her window is open,” he repeated.

“Open.” Carroll nodded, almost genially. “It appears that she has eloped, my lord.”

“Eloped.”

Carroll contented himself with nodding. He saw the marchioness walking swiftly down the hallway toward the marquis’s back, and he wanted nothing to do with her once she knew this pretty piece of news.

“You might check her room for a note, my lord.” With that advice, Carroll faded back through the servants’ door.

He was just in time to quell a rising wave of hilarity in the servants’ quarter. Eloise was starchy enough about personal matters that her employees were hysterical with laughter to hear that her daughter had run off to Gretna Green.

Carroll delivered a stern lecture about not talking of the family disgrace (little chance of that!) and sent them all off to bed, inconspicuously counting to make sure that every one of his seventeen footmen were in bed where they should be. Footmen, he knew well, were an eternal lure to young ladies, and he’d never get over the shame if Lady Sophie had set her eye on one of his lads.

Meanwhile, the Marquis of Brandenburg stayed exactly where he was, staring at the pieced Italian marble that adorned the front hallway.