Maggie wanted to wring her hands, but she forced herself to keep them at her sides. “Have you worked here long?”

Bridget O’Malley’s look was enough to quell even the boldest. “Long enough,” she answered, her eyes moving over Maggie with undisguised contempt. “Don’t be using the back door in the future, miss,” she said. “You’re a little better than the rest of us, so Dune—Mr. Kirk will expect you to come in and out in front, like the gentry.”

Maggie felt as though she’d just been soundly slapped, but she was hurt rather than angry. Why was it that none of these people were willing to accept her as what she was, another domestic servant? “Mrs. O’Malley—”

“Miss O’Malley,” snapped the housekeeper, putting a curious emphasis on the “miss.”

Completely thwarted now, Maggie subsided, her cheeks flaring with color. She wished that Tansy were there, that she had a friend with whom she could talk and laugh. Her feeling of isolation was all but intolerable.

“The master was asking about you earlier,” Bridget said, concentrating on the dishes she was washing. “You’ll go and see what he wants, if you know what’s good for you.”

Maggie lifted her chin, recovering from the rebuff now. She’d gotten through nineteen years without Bridget O’Malley’s friendship, and she could get through a hundred and nineteen more. “Thank you,” she said coldly, and then she swept out of the kitchen in the same imperious way she’d seen Rosalind leave shops that had not carried suitable merchandise.

When she reached the second floor, she was nothing less than amazed to find Duncan Kirk there, with Tad clinging to his back and Jeremy to his middle. All three were laughing, and it was a moment before Maggie realized that she’d interrupted a sort of hallway wrestling match. Some of the sting of her encounter with Bridget ebbed away, and she found herself smiling.

Duncan’s face sobered when he caught sight of Maggie and, at an unspoken signal, both Jeremy and Tad stepped away from him, suddenly silent. “Well, Miss Chamberlin,” Mr. Kirk said in a low and curiously stricken voice, “you’ve returned.”

Maggie felt as though she’d been caught doing something underhanded. “I was only out walking,” she said.

Duncan laughed softly and then laid a hand to each of his sons’ shoulders. “Go and wash up for supper,” he told them, and they vanished immediately, leaving Maggie alone in the hallway with their father.

For a long and singularly uncomfortable moment, Duncan simply watched Maggie. It was as though he could see deep inside her and discern her most private thoughts. Maggie blushed because too many of those thoughts were of Reeve McKenna, and too many of them were scandalous.

“You know, don’t you,” Duncan finally said, “that you are very, very beautiful?”