“I’d use wards to keep you from doing mean things to my dolls,” Olive said to her brother. She’d quit clinging to me and had more of her usual spirit in her voice.

“And I’d keep you out of my room,” Rollo said.

Lord Henry broke up the argument by stepping between them and saying, “First, though, you must learn your other lessons. You both have school tomorrow.”

“If they don’t burn the school down or break all its windows,” Rollo said, a trifle too eagerly.

“Let’s plan as though everything will be perfectly normal in the morning. Just think, you’ll have something to talk about with your friends.” Lord Henry unlocked the piano’s wheels and pushed it aside so he could open the door.

“And Flora slept through it!” Olive said.

“That’s probably for the best,” Lord Henry said with a crooked smile. “I’m not very good with fainting, hysterical ladies.” I knew otherwise from earlier in the evening, but then my hysteria had been far less dramatic than Flora’s likely would have been.

“She wouldn’t have fainted unless there was a boy here she wanted to catch her,” Olive said. “Or she’d have just said the riot was boring because it didn’t come here.”

“She’d have been insulted that they skipped us and she’d have gone out to demand our fair share,” Rollo said.

“That’s quite enough insulting your sister in her absence,” Lord Henry said with an ill-concealed grin. I was smiling myself. It was a good sign if the children were already joking. “Now, off to bed with the both of you.”

Rollo went right away, but Olive lingered. “I don’t think I can sleep,” she said plaintively.

“If you go choose a book and then get in bed, I predict that Miss Newton will come read you a story.”

“I can read her a story,” she said indignantly before flouncing off to her room.

When she was gone, Lord Henry turned to me, his smile fading and his shoulders sagging with weariness. I suddenly felt intensely conscious of standing before him in my nightgown, with my feet bare and my hair loose and wild. It was an extremely inappropriate way of facing my employer. I reassured myself that we had kept the lights off in the room, which made the nightgown less revealing. “I don’t think they’ll come back tonight,” he said softly, “but we’ll keep a watch, all the same.”

The sound of a clanging bell sent us to the window to see the police and a fire crew arriving. “I hope no one was hurt,” I said.