But his mother had laid a firm hand on his arm. “Come, Charles,” she said. “We are expected elsewhere. Good evening to you, Sinclair.”

She pointedly ignored Frances.

Charles bent one lingering, wounded look upon Frances before submitting to being led away by the countess, whose hair plumes nodded indignantly above her head as she swept from the room without looking to left or right.

“Your own excruciating little moment sprung to life from nightmare, Frances?” Viscount Sinclair asked. “Or should I say Françoise? I take it Fontbridge is a discarded lover from your past?”

“I had better leave,” she said. “I daresay my aunts are ready to go. It has been a busy evening for them.”

“Ah, yes, run away,” he said. “It is what you do best, Frances. But first perhaps I can cheer you up a little. Let me take you to Lady Lyle.”

“She is here?” Frances actually found herself laughing. All she needed to complete the disaster of the evening now was to find that George Ralston was here too.

“I thought that she would like to hear you,” he said. “And that you would like to see her once more. I invited her to come.”

“Did you?” She smiled up at him. “Did you really? Do you not suppose I would have called upon Lady Lyle before now if I had wished for a tender reunion with her?”

He sighed out loud.

“I remember,” he said, “that on a certain snowy road several months ago I informed you that you were going to have to ride up with me in my carriage and you gave me a flat refusal. At that moment, Frances, I made the greatest mistake of my life. I gave in to a chivalrous impulse, albeit grudgingly, and stayed to argue. I ought to have driven away and left you to your fate.”

“Yes,” she said, “you ought. And I ought to have stuck with my first decision.”

“We have been the plague of each other’s lives ever since,” he said.

“You have been the plague of mine,” she said.

“And you have been nothing but sweetness and light to me, I suppose,” he said.

“I have never wanted to be anything at all to you,” she told him. “I have always been firm on that.”

“Except on one memorable night,” he said, “when you joined your body with mine three separate times, Frances. I do not believe it was ravishment.”

Oh, goodness, she thought, they were quarreling in full sight of a whole ballroomful of people. And she had just spotted Lady Lyle, sitting slightly apart from everyone else just inside the ballroom. She was looking as elegant as ever, her distinctive silver hair piled high and decorated with plumes. She was also looking slightly amused, her eyes fixed upon Frances.

“I have no wish to speak with Lady Lyle,” Frances said. “And I have no wish to remain here any longer. I am going to join my great-aunts now. Thank you for what you tried to do for me this evening, Lord Sinclair. I realize that you thought it would please me, and for a while it really did. But I am going to go back to Bath within the next few days. This is good-bye.”

“Again?” One of his eyebrows lifted once more and he smiled. But for all that, she thought, there was a certain bleakness in his eyes—a bleakness that was echoed in her heart. “Does this not become a little tedious, Frances?”

She could have reminded him that it would not have been necessary this time if he had left well enough alone and not suggested that Great-Aunt Martha summon her to London, supposedly to Great-Aunt Gertrude’s deathbed.

“Good-bye,” she said, and realized only when the word was out that she had whispered it.

He nodded his head a few times and then turned abruptly to stride away into the ballroom.

Frances watched him go and wondered if this now finally was the end.

But how could it not be?

The Countess of Fontbridge knew that she had come back to London.

So did Charles.

And so did Lady Lyle.

It would not take long for George Ralston to discover it too.

All she was left to hope for was that Bath would still be a safe enough refuge.

Lucius fully intended to honor his vow to let Frances go this time. He had made his feelings and intentions clear to her, he had done his utmost to get her to admit that she was not indifferent to him, he had even tried to be selfless and further the singing career that ought to have been hers a long time ago even if he could not at the same time further any romance between them.

But she had remained stubborn.

He had no choice but to let her go—unless he was prepared to make even more of an ass of himself than he already had.

He was simply going to have to keep himself busy with wedding plans.

His own, perish the thought.

When he sat through an afternoon visit with Portia and her mama, however, the very day after the concert, he found himself feeling trapped rather than joyful or even resigned. He had just brought Amy home from a visit to the Tower of London and had poked his head around the door of the drawing room to inform his mother that he did not expect to be home for dinner.

A moment later he cursed himself for not checking with the servants to see if anyone was with her. But curses, even silent ones, were now pointless. There they all were—his mother, Margaret, Caroline, and Emily, with Lady Balderston and Portia. If Tait had not been there too, looking hopefully toward the door as if for rescue, Lucius might have withdrawn after a brief exchange of pleasantries. But he did not have the heart to abandon his brother-in-law to his lonely fate.

And so two minutes later he was sitting on a sofa beside Portia, a cup of tea in his hands.

It seemed that he had interrupted a lengthy discussion on bonnets. He exchanged an almost imperceptible grimace with Tait as it resumed.

But Portia turned to him after everything that could possibly be said on the subject had been said.

“Mama has explained to Lady Sinclair that it really was a mistake to allow Amy to attend the concert here last evening,” she said.

“Indeed?” Instant irritation set in.

“The whole thing was a mistake, in fact,” she continued, “and will doubtless be an embarrassment to you for the next few days. But I daresay you did not know, and that must be your defense. It will be my defense on your behalf. Mistakes need not be quite disastrous, though, unless we refuse to learn from them. I am assured that you will learn caution, Lucius, especially when you have someone with a more level head to advise you.”

He was looking at her with both eyebrows raised. What the deuce was she talking about? And was she offering her level head as his future adviser? But of course she was. She was not offering, though—she was assuming.

“In future you must choose the musical talent at your concerts with greater care,” she said kindly. “You ought to have checked Miss Allard’s credentials more carefully, Lucius, though one really ought to be able to assume that a schoolteacher is respectable. Mama and Papa and I certainly made that assumption when we condescended to seek an introduction to her.”

Everyone was listening, of course. But they seemed to be content to allow Portia to do the talking.

Lucius’s eyes narrowed. Irritation was no longer an option. He had moved beyond it to something more dangerous. But he kept his feelings leashed.

“And what exactly is it, Portia,” he asked, “that makes Miss Allard unrespectable? What sort of gossip have you been listening to?”

“I really do not believe, Lord Sinclair,” Lady Balderston said, her voice stiff with suppressed indignation, “we can ever be accused of being vulgar enough to listen to gossip. We heard it from Lady Lyle’s own lips last evening, and Lady Lyle was once kind and misguided enough to give a home to that French girl, who is now trying to pass herself off as an Englishwoman.”

“And this,” Lucius said, raising his eyebrows, “is Miss Allard’s sin, ma’am? That some people pronounce her name Halard? That she had a French father—and an Italian mother? She was planted here as a baby, perhaps, so that she might grow into a French spy? How exciting that would be! Perhaps we should dash off to capture her and drag her in chains to the Tower of London to await her fate.”

Tait turned a snort of laughter into a throat-clearing exercise.

“Lucius,” his mother said, “this is hardly the time for levity.”

“Did someone say it was, then?” he asked, turning his eyes on her and noticing that Emily beyond her was regarding him with dancing eyes and her dimple in full view.

“I like the French pronunciation of her name,” Caroline said, “and wonder that she changed it.”

“The truth is, Lucius,” Portia said, “that Lady Lyle was compelled to turn Miss Allard out of her home because she was consorting with the wrong people and singing at private parties no respectable lady should even know about, let alone attend, and building a scandalous reputation. Who knows what else she was involved in.”