Sarah cleared her throat. “Ehrm, was there any reason you wished me to know of your regard?”

“What? Oh, yes.” Lady Danbury thumped her cane on the ground. “Despite my advancing age, I forget nothing.” She paused. “Except occasionally what I’ve just said.”

Sarah kept her face fixed with a blank smile and tried to tamp down a gnawing sense of dread.

Lady Danbury let out a dramatic sigh. “I suppose one can’t reach the age of seventy without making a few concessions to it.”

Sarah suspected that seventy missed the mark by at least a decade, but there was no way she was going to make this opinion public.

“What I was going to say,” Lady Danbury continued, her voice dripping with the long-suffering tones of the endlessly interrupted (despite the fact that she was the only one who had been talking), “is that when you expressed surprise at my presence, which we both know was nothing more than a feeble attempt to make conversation, and I said, ‘Where else would I be?’ you should have said, ‘Apparently you don’t find polite conversation very diverting.’ ”

Sarah’s lips parted and hung there in an astonished oval for a full two seconds before she said, “I am afraid I can’t follow you.”

Lady Danbury fixed her with a vaguely aggravated stare before saying, “I had told you that I found awkward conversations to be very diverting, and you said that nonsense about being surprised to see me, then I quite rightly called you foolish.”

“I don’t believe you called her foolish,” Lord Hugh murmured.

“Didn’t I? Well, I thought it.” Lady Danbury thumped her cane on the carpet and turned back to Sarah. “At any rate, I was only trying to be helpful. There’s never any point spouting useless platitudes. Makes you seem a bit like a wooden post, and you don’t want that, do you?”

“It really depends on the location of the wooden post,” Sarah replied, wondering how many wooden posts one might find in, say, Bombay.

“Well done, Lady Sarah,” Lady Danbury applauded. “Keep sharpening that tongue. I expect you’ll wish to keep your wits about you this evening.”

“I generally wish to keep my wits about myself every evening.”

Lady Danbury gave an approving nod. “And you—” She turned to Lord Hugh, much to Sarah’s delight. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten you.”

“I believe you said you forget nothing,” he said.

“So I did,” Lady Danbury replied. “Rather like your father in that regard, I expect.”

Sarah gasped. Even for Lady Danbury, this was audacious.

But Lord Hugh proved to be more than her match. His expression did not change in the least as he said, “Ah, but that is not the case at all. My father’s memory is relentlessly selective.”

“But tenacious.”

“Also relentlessly.”

“Well,” Lady Danbury declared, thumping her cane on the carpet. “I expect it’s time to call him off.”

“I have very little control over my father, Lady Danbury.”

“No man is without all resources.”