As he turned from the looking glass after arranging his cravat, Alice stretched out her arms to him in mute appeal. Her black hair was tumbling about the ivory of her shoulders and her eyes were wide and dark in the moonlit room.

The ghost looked at her gravely and then a wicked smile lit up his handsome face.

“Stap me vitals!” he said cheerfully. “Why so serious? Damme, we will be mad together until the dawn takes me!”

He wrenched off his cravat and divested himself of the rest of his clothes at great speed. “Thou art the loveliest thing I have ever held in my arms, Alice. Come to me again. Come here my sweeting and we will further thine education. We still have the night and a few more hours of my life. Come to me, Alice!”

Chapter 9

Miss Fadden was alarmed to say the least. She was a light sleeper and there had been sounds issuing from Alice’s bedroom during the night hours which had disturbed her greatly. And now, here was Alice, all ready to go driving with her fiancé, face flushed, shadows under her dreamy eyes.

“What right have I to say anything?” thought Miss Fadden bleakly. “I think they might be imposters of some sort. I do not believe he is her uncle. But I am an imposter myself!”

For, truth to tell, Miss Fadden was not a curate’s daughter, nor had she been mourning the death of her father when the Duke had come across her in the churchyard. She was in fact an elderly housemaid who had found she was to be dismissed without a penny after years of service to a merchant and his wife and large family.

She had stolen money and her mistress’s clothes—hence the overlarge-sized gray wardrobe—and had taken a modest room in London. But she had only stolen a very little money and it had soon run out, leaving her in arrears with the rent; in order to escape detection, she had changed her accent from its coarse low London tones to a genteel simpering whisper which she felt matched her clothes.

She had come to care for her young mistress very much, at first simply out of pure gratitude and then because of Alice herself. “Had I been a real lady,” thought Miss Cassandra Fadden dismally, “then I would be shocked. I would accuse her of being abed with her uncle. I would tell her of my suspicions; I would tell her I am sure that this Gervase is not her uncle and that he is not French. I am sure she is not French either. But, dearie me, she might dismiss me and then what would become of me?”