“Thank you, Mr. Kirk. I’d like the position very much.”

“Excellent. Lady Cosgrove will send you around in one of her carriages, no doubt.”

Maggie nodded and rose awkwardly from her chair; Mr. Kirk was sitting so close that she feared brushing against him. It was a squeeze, but she managed to stand without the embarrassment of improper intimacy. The smile that quirked her new employer’s lips at her effort puzzled and unsettled her, and she hastened to take her leave.

Lady Cosgrove’s driver, left waiting far longer than he should have been, due to Maggie’s unofficial call on Mr. McKenna, was surly. “Took you long enough, that it did,” he snarled.

Maggie gave the driver a saucy look and opened the carriage door herself, since he hadn’t bothered to get down from the box and do it for her. Safely inside the luxurious vehicle, she thought of that spineless Philip Briggs and then of the equally impossible Mr. Reeve McKenna, and decided that she detested them both.

Reeve was in a foul mood; Loretta could see that even from a distance. She stepped back from the parlor window, with its splendid view of Rushcutter’s Bay, and turned all her attention on little Elisabeth, who sat upon the cool bricks of the hearth, absorbed, as always, in her drawing.

The child was an enigma to Loretta, beautiful with her dark, dark hair and her uncle’s aquamarine eyes. At four, Elisabeth McKenna possessed an uncanny ability to transcribe real life to a series of lines and shadows on paper, but for all that she rarely spoke, except to say “Papa” on occasion.

Reeve had taken the child from doctor to doctor, seeking a cure for his niece as doggedly as he sought his lost brother, Jamie, who had been transported a full twenty years before. There had been no success on either front: The doctors said that there was nothing medically wrong with Elisabeth, that she’d probably suffered some trauma they’d never know about, when her mother abandoned her. As for Jamie McKenna, the best detectives in all of Australia hadn’t been able to turn up a trace of him—except for his cast-off child, of course—though they went right on collecting their outrageous fees.

As far as Loretta was concerned, both enterprises were a waste of time as well as money. If Elisabeth delighted in being difficult, so be it. The little scamp needn’t think it was any skin off Loretta’s nose. And when it came to Jamie, he was probably a ne’er-do-well—if he was alive at all. He hadn’t been able to look after his own daughter, in any case. Elisabeth had been found in an orphanage.

The front door opened and Elisabeth’s whole countenance was suddenly aglow. She shuffled her everlasting sketchbook and pencils aside and scrambled to her feet, bounding into the entry hall with a cry of glee.