And they all became aware of the hush that had begun to descend beyond the curtains that divided the stage from the rest of the small ballroom. Merrick reentered the room with Freddie in tow almost at the same moment. Freddie was wearing a white waistcoat.

"Oh, you do look distinguished, Freddie," Anne said.

Freddie beamed and both Merrick and Jack grinned. Martin and Maud stepped onto the stage and took up their positions for the opening scene.


************************************

Freddie had been quite right. The performance proceeded quite flawlessly if one ignored the fact that Freddie, Hortense, and Constance, who were supposed to be caught in a fit of the giggles when Mr. Hardcastle mentioned one of his old jokes, really did become hysterical and laughed for much longer than the script called for. Freddie said afterward with some indignation that he could have remained perfectly serious if the audience had not laughed so loudly and destroyed his control.

The members of the audience had come out for an unusually festive evening. Many of them had attended a lavish dinner earlier and ail of them would be attending a large and elaborate ball later. It was a special treat, even for those who had come from the busy social life of town, to be entertained with a full-length and well-known drama between the two events. No one had come prepared to be overly critical. The humor was laughed at, the romance smiled at. The fact that the hero and heroine were a husband and wife who had never been seen together before ensured that extra attention was paid to the main romantic scenes, and several people actually applauded when Merrick caught his wife around the waist and planted a kiss on her lips when the character he played mistook her character for a maid in the Hardcastle house.

But it was Peregrine who stole the show. Everyone took one curtain call at the end. Merrick and Anne and Maud took two, and Peregrine three. The audience had roared with laughter at his treatment of the scene in which Tony Lumpkin takes his mother by night in a wide circle around the house while she believes that she is thirty miles from home on Crackskull Common surrounded by highwaymen. At his third curtain call, Peregrine sang again a raucous and rather vulgar song that he had sung at the Three Jolly Pigeons inn during the play.

It made a fitting ending to what had really been a very jolly middle part of the evening. Claude declared after the curtain had been closed for the final time and the stage was suddenly strewn with wigs and fans and buckled shoes that had proved too tight for the wearers, that the duchess had actually had tears in her eyes at the end of it all and that even the duke had looked suspiciously bright-eyed.

"And so they should," Jack said. "Shedding a few tears is the least the old tyrants can do after ruining a perfectly decent couple of weeks for us all. The next time I am invited down here for an anniversary I shall remember a quite pressing previous engagement."

"Oh, nonsense, Jack," Hortense said. "You know you have loved every minute of it. And tonight you were positively basking in the glory of being so much in the limelight. You know very well that all the ladies will be falling over themselves to dance with you later on, now that they have seen how dashing you looked on the stage."

"Sisters!" Jack said, his eyes turned skyward.

The duke and duchess came through the doorway, the former supporting himself very heavily on an ivory-handled cane. "You were all quite wonderful!" the duchess said. "In fact, I do not know quite how we got out of the habit of gathering here every Christmas and having theatrics. We really must start again."

"Grandmamma," Jack said, "I have no wish to be rude, but if you wish us to be present to see you and Grandpapa open the ball, you must allow us to go upstairs to dress."

"Are you really going to dance with Great-aunt Jemima?" Prudence asked the duke, saucer-eyed.

"You think I am incapable of doing so?" the duke barked, glaring at his grand-niece.

She laughed and hugged him as she followed her cousins and other relatives from the room.


************************************

Merrick was in the main ballroom long before most of the other actors and actresses put in an appearance. He was dressed in a black, closely fitting evening coat and knee breeches, looking quite conspicuous among the brightly colored clothes of most of the other men present. Only the vivid whiteness of his lace cuffs, silk stockings, starched shirt points, and elaborately tied neckcloth relieved the severity of his outfit. But there was nothing dull about his appearance, if the many glances he was receiving from a large number of ladies were any indication.

The duke and duchess were still in the receiving line. The dancing had not yet begun, though the hour was well advanced. Merrick spoke to a large number of acquaintances, but he waited impatiently for the arrival of his wife. He had thought of going to her room so that he might accompany her downstairs, but he found himself unaccountably shy of doing so. They did not yet have a normal husband-and-wife relationship, despite the fact that they had shared a bed for the past two weeks. He could not bring himself to walk into her dressing room, where her maid would probably be fussing over her. So he had come down alone to await her in the ballroom.

He felt restless and strangely excited. He wanted her with him as he talked to acquaintances. He wanted people to see them together; he wanted everyone to know that he claimed her as his wife. He had found more and more in the last few days that his eyes followed her whenever she was in his view and that he had a greater awareness of her presence in a room than of anyone else's. When he had become conscious of the fact, he had asked himself why it was, and the answer had fascinated him. He found her beautiful, desirable, charming.

He was proud of her, proud that she belonged to him. He had noticed with the pride of possession that the other members of his family liked and even admired her. And he had seen the reason why. Anne was a kind and warmhearted person, a fact that was not immediately evident because she was quiet and unassuming. But Freddie responded to her, and the children were constantly hanging about her skirts when they were not confined to the schoolroom. Jack treated her with noticeably more respect and less flirtatiousness than he had at first. And the rest of the family appeared to accept her and love her as if she had always been one of their number.

Merrick had decided two days before that he would keep his wife with him and make a proper marriage of their relationship. He had not yet told her. He planned to do so this evening. It would be a fitting occasion on which to pledge themselves to a new life together. She was planning to return to Redlands the next day and talked of it quite freely to other family members. He had kept to himself the knowledge that he would be able to hand her a last-minute reprieve. She did not know that she would be spending the rest of the spring in London, tasting all the delights that the Season had to offer. She did not know that he planned to lavish his money on her, buying her clothes and jewels and anything else that her heart desired. Perhaps when the Season was over he would travel with her and show her places and treasures that she had only dreamed of seeing.

He could hardly wait. Merrick smiled and bowed toward a couple of dowagers, who had found themselves comfortable chairs against the wall and were obviously settled for a comfortable coze, probably at the expense of many of the guests present. He had been looking forward to this part of the evening even before the discovery he had made earlier in the evening. He supposed it was Freddie who had caused it all. Anne's comment on his white waistcoat when he had entered the room had been so obviously calculated to make the poor man feel good about his costume that Merrick had had to smile. But looking at Anne, sitting in such a stately fashion on the edge of her chair, her back ramrod-straight, her wig and plumes looking so delightfully elegant, the black patch close to her mouth so provocative, he had been surprised by a totally unexpected rush of tenderness. How utterly sweet she was. And how he loved her!

The feeling of wonder had stayed with him throughout the play. As he acted out his part, he had fallen in love with Anne as surely as Charles Marlow had fallen in love with Kate Hardcastle. Of course he wanted her with him after this night was over. And of course he would want her after the Season was over. He would want her for the rest of his life. And so he waited for her arrival in the ballroom with impatience, longing to see her, to touch her, dance with her, talk to her, and eventually to tell her the truth. Finally he would be able to treat her without the cruelty that had plagued his relationship with her. He had it in his power to make her happy, to make amends for the past. Through his own fault, she had lived a dreary and a lonely life for more than a year. He would see to it that she had everything that money could buy and love offer for the rest of her life.

Anne, meanwhile, was ready and excited. She had been to some parties and balls on a small scale as a young girl. But she had never prepared for anything on such a lavish scale as this. She had been busy and preoccupied with the play all day, but even so, she had been aware of the fevered activities going on in the house in preparation for the ball that evening. She had been passing through the downstairs hall at the same moment in the day as a seemingly endless string of footmen were carrying huge armfuls of flowers in the direction of the ballroom, and she had peeped into the room on her way upstairs after tea to find that it was transformed into a magnificent garden that quite took her breath away.