A tall woman, clad in a fashionable white silk dress trimmed in the softest wine-colored velvet, with a tiny feathered hat to match, stood scandalously close to him, her gloved hands moving up and down his sides in a most familiar way.

“You still smell of the sugar fields, darling!” the vision trilled, and her laugh rang out in the night like the sound of bells in the far distance. “Oh, but I’m so glad you’re here—”

Reeve McKenna muttered, “Loretta,” and bent his magnificent head to kiss the woman who clung to him with a thoroughness that made Maggie, watching in horrified fascination, wonder what there was to do while kissing besides touching lips. It was clear enough that something more complicated was going on here, and it was galling not to know what that something was.

“Ah-hem,” said Maggie, to let them know that she was there.

Mr. McKenna seemed in no hurry to end the kiss; indeed, his hands encircled the woman’s tiny waist and lifted her slightly, the better to mystify untutored onlookers such as Maggie.

Embarrassed and not a little envious, Maggie nevertheless found the courage to clear her throat again, this time more loudly.

It was the woman who broke away from the kiss, putting her small hands to Reeve’s chest and twisting her head to one side with a delicate gasp. Deep brown eyes glistened in the lamplight, taking in Maggie’s person with dispatch. “Yes?”

By now Maggie wished that she’d stayed in that dreadful shed with Tansy, among the women and the seaweed and the rats. Before she could think of a reply, Mr. McKenna assessed her almost as coolly as his ladyfriend had and said, “In the morning, Miss Chamberlin. In the morning.”

Maggie felt like a child; even in the darkness she was painfully conscious of the contrast between her clothes and those of Mr. McKenna’s mistress. And there were other differences, too—differences in age, in experience, in sophistication, that were equally hard to bear. “Yes—thank you—” she said stupidly, turning to walk away.

She waited outside the shed until her flaming cheeks had cooled.

“Who on earth was that?” Loretta demanded coyly, keeping the carriage driver waiting, toying with the collar of Reeve’s smoke-tinged work shirt.

Reeve was impatient; this was neither the time nor the place to discuss the Yankee. He wanted to reach the town house, look in on Elisabeth, and then luxuriate in Loretta’s uncanny knack for driving him right out of his mind. “Just a girl,” he said.

Loretta would not be moved; her feet were rooted to the cobblestones and her dark eyes searched Reeve’s face. “’In the morning,’ you said. What’s going to happen in the morning, Reeve?”