Chloe thought about defending her school friend and then decided to keep quiet. Sissy did have awful taste in clothing, there was no getting around it. Chloe fancied that she herself would have good clothes sense, if her mother would ever let her choose a gown made in a current mode. But now that Lord Holland had dropped his suit, Mrs. van Stork said quite frankly that she didn’t see any reason to spend a huge amount of money outfitting Chloe. If she found another beau, then they’d see about it. But Chloe thought agonizingly that she didn’t want another beau. She wanted Will, and only Will. But Will had not only disappeared from her life; she hadn’t seen him at the theater—even if from afar—for over a month. She was getting over him, she promised herself. Any day now she would stop crying herself to sleep.

She certainly didn’t look like a weepy miss in Charlotte’s portrait. In the end Charlotte had posed Chloe in three-quarters profile. Against the background of her dark dress and the dark couch, her porcelain white skin and deep blue eyes gave her an otherworldly beauty, an unquestioning look of serenity.

“I don’t usually feel like that,” Chloe said in a rather small voice.

Charlotte pulled her over to the divan. “Now that the portrait is finished, I want to know what is going on,” she said. “Where is Will? I haven’t seen him in weeks!”

“I don’t know,” Chloe replied miserably. “I don’t have any idea.”

“Hmmm,” Charlotte said. “It’s not like Will to miss the prime part of the season.”

“I know,” Chloe said in response to her unspoken comment. “He has to find a rich bride, doesn’t he?”

Charlotte was touched by the obvious distress in Chloe’s eyes. She nimbly avoided the question.

“Did you turn him down?” Charlotte asked.

Chloe’s eyes fell to her hands, pleating and repleating the folds of her heavy skirt. “No,” she half-whispered. “He didn’t ask me.”

“Well, do you think your father might have warned him off? Because, poor thing, he does need to marry a fortune, after all. He might lose his estate, from what I hear. And all because his father was so addicted to racehorses. It’s a shame.”