“I thought I might read in the library,” she admitted. “It’s silly, I know, since that’s what I’ve been doing in my room these past few days, but I’m desperate to be anywhere but that bedchamber. I think I would go read in a wardrobe just for the change of scenery.”

“It would be an interesting change of scenery,” he said.

“Dark,” she agreed.

“Woolly.”

She pressed her lips together in what turned out to be a failed attempt to hold back laughter. “Woolly?” she echoed.

“That’s what you’d find in my wardrobe.”

“I find myself alarmed by a vision of sheep.” She paused, then winced. “And of what Harriet might do with such a scene in one of her plays.”

He held up a hand. “Let us change the subject.”

She cocked her head to the side, then realized she was smiling flirtatiously. So she stopped smiling. But she still felt unaccountably flirtatious.

So she smiled again, because she liked smiling, and she liked feeling flirtatious, and most of all because she knew he would know that she wasn’t actually flirting with him. Because she wasn’t. She was just feeling flirtatious. It was a result of having been cooped up in that room for so long with no one but sisters and cousins.

“You were on your way to the library,” he said.

“I was.”

“And you started out at . . .”

“The breakfast room.”

“You did not make it very far.”

“No,” she admitted, “I didn’t.”

“Did it perhaps occur to you,” he asked in careful tones, “that you should not be walking on that foot?”

“It did, as a matter of fact.”

He quirked a brow. “Pride?”

She gave him a glum nod of confirmation. “Far too much of it.”

“What shall we do now?”

She looked down at her traitorous ankle. “I suppose I need to find someone to carry me there.”

There was a long pause, long enough for her to look up. But he had turned away, so all she saw was his profile. Finally, he cleared his throat and asked, “Would you like to borrow my cane?”

Her lips parted in surprise. “But don’t you need it?”

“Not for shorter distances. It helps,” he said, before she could point out that she’d never seen him without it, “but it is not strictly necessary.”

She was about to agree to his suggestion; she even reached for the cane, but then she stopped, because he was just the sort of man to do something stupid in the name of chivalry. “You can walk without the cane,” she said, looking directly into his eyes, “but does it mean that your leg will give you more pain later?”

He went quite still, and then he said, “Probably.”

“Thank you for not lying to me.”

“I almost did,” he admitted.

She allowed herself a tiny smile. “I know.”