Marianne Marks said to give Gabriella her love as she made her exit. “I promised to go up and visit her before I left, but she must be asleep by now,” she said with regret as the child's mother frowned and looked startled.

“I should hope so!” she said sternly. “Did you see her tonight?” she asked Marianne, almost vaguely, seeming surprised but not particularly concerned about it.

“I did,” the pretty woman confessed sheepishly, forgetting what Gabriella had said about not being allowed to see the guests, and not giving it much importance. Who could get angry at an angel like Gabriella? But there were far too many things Marianne did not know about the child's mother. “She's so adorable. She was sitting at the top of the stairs when we arrived, in the sweetest little pink nightgown. I ran upstairs to give her a kiss, and we chatted for a few minutes.”

“I'm sorry,” Eloise said, looking mildly annoyed. “She shouldn't have done that.” She said it apologetically, as though Gabriella had done something appalling to offend them, and in Eloise's eyes she had. She had made her presence known, which was an unpardonable sin to her mother, but Marianne Marks couldn't have known that.

“It was my fault. I'm afraid I couldn't resist her, with those huge eyes. She wanted to see my tiara.”

“I hope you didn't let her touch it.” Something in Eloise's eyes told Marianne not to say more, and as they left the Harrison house that night, Marianne said something about it to Robert.

“She's awfully hard on that child, don't you think, Bob? She acted as though she would have stolen my tiara, if I'd let her.”

“She may just be very old-fashioned about children, she was probably afraid Gabriella had annoyed you.”

“How could she annoy me?” Marianne said innocently as they drove home behind their chauffeur. “She's the sweetest little thing I've ever seen… so serious, and so pretty. She has the saddest eyes…” And then, wistfully, “I wish we had a little girl like her.”

“I know,” he said, patting her hand, and glancing away from the disappointment in his wife's eyes. He knew what it meant to her that in nine years of marriage they had never been able to have children. But it was something they both had to accept now.

“She's hard on John too,” Marianne volunteered after a few moments of silence, thinking of the children they would never have, and the pretty little girl she had talked to that evening.

“Who?” Robert's mind was on other things by then. He'd had a busy day at the office, and was already thinking ahead to the next one. He had dismissed the Harrisons from his mind, and his wife's comments about their daughter.

“Eloise.” Marianne brought him back to the evening at hand, and he nodded. “John danced with that English girl Prince Orlovsky brought several times, and I thought Eloise looked as though she were about to kill him.”

Robert Marks smiled at his wife's assessment of the situation. “And I suppose you would have been fine if I'd danced with her?” He raised an eyebrow, and his wife laughed at him. “The woman scarcely had any clothes on.” She'd been wearing a flesh-colored satin gown that clung to her like skin, and left absolutely nothing to the imagination. She'd been quite spectacular and John Harrison had clearly found her very entertaining. Who hadn't?

“I suppose I can't blame Eloise,” Marianne admitted sheepishly. And then, seemingly without guile, as she turned her big blue eyes innocently to her husband, “Did you think she was pretty?”

But he knew better than to answer, as he laughed heartily, just as they reached their house on East Seventy-ninth Street. “I'm not going to fall for that one, Miss Marianne! I thought she was dreadful-looking, a complete harpy, and with a figure as bad as hers, she should never have attempted to wear that dress. I can't imagine what Orlovsky was thinking when he brought her!” They both laughed at his extricating himself from his wife's question, and they both knew that she had been a striking beauty and more than a trifle racy. But Robert Marks had never had any interest whatsoever in any woman other than his pretty wife, and it didn't matter a fig to him that she couldn't have children. He adored her. And his only interest now was in getting her upstairs to their bedroom. He didn't give a damn about Orlovsky's new mistress.

But the same was not quite so true for John Harrison, who was engaged in a similar, though far more heated, conversation with Eloise in their bedroom.

“For God's sake, why didn't you just take her dress off?” Eloise said tartly. He had danced repeatedly with the much-discussed English girl in the skintight beige satin dress, and his amorous dances with her had not gone unnoticed, either by Eloise or Prince Orlovsky.

“For chrissake, Eloise, I was just being polite. She'd had a lot to drink and didn't know what she was doing.”

“How convenient for you,” Eloise said coldly. “I suppose when her strap slipped off her shoulder, and her breast was exposed, it was entirely an accident that you were practically kissing her at the time.” She was pacing around the room, smoking, and they'd both been drinking heavily all evening.

“I wasn't kissing her and you know it. We were dancing.”

“You were nearly making love to her, right there on the dance floor. You humiliated me in front of our friends.” And as far as she was concerned, he needed to be punished for it.

“Maybe if you were more interested in sleeping with me, Eloise, I wouldn't need to dance that way with a total stranger.” Not that he cared anymore. How could he after what he'd seen her do to Gabriella? He was standing over Eloise, and their voices were raised, but for once Gabriella couldn't hear them. She was sound asleep in her bedroom. The last guest had left at two o'clock, and it was nearly three o'clock in the morning as her parents argued. They had been at it ever since the party had ended, and their words were getting more and more heated, as were their tempers.

“You're disgusting,” Eloise said, standing as close to him as she dared. They both looked enraged, and the truth was that he would have loved to have taken the girl from Vladimir Orlovsky, and might still do it. His fidelity to, and his feelings for, Eloise had disappeared years before. As far as he was concerned, cruel as she was to their child, and cold as she was with him, she deserved it and he owed her nothing. “You're a bastard, and she's a whore!” Eloise said, wanting to humiliate him and to hurt him, but she couldn't. He didn't care what she thought anymore, or what she said. He hated everything about her, and she knew it.

“And you're a bitch, Eloise. It's no secret anymore. Everyone knows it. There isn't a man worth a damn in this town who'd want you.” She didn't answer him with words this time, but reached back and slapped him as hard as she could, almost as hard as she might have hit their daughter.

“Don't waste your energy. I'm not Gabriella,” he said, giving her a furious shove as she fell backward against a chair and knocked it over. She was still picking herself up off the floor as he strode out of the room, and slammed the door behind him. He never looked back, he didn't care, and for a crazed moment he almost hoped that he had hurt her. She deserved it, she had inflicted so much pain on him, and their little girl, she deserved to get some of it back. He didn't know where he was going that night, and he didn't care. He knew that the English girl would be in bed with Orlovsky by then, so he couldn't go to her, although he knew where she lived. But there were plenty of others, girls he called from time to time, professionals he used, or married women who were happy to spend an afternoon with him, or single ones who deluded themselves he might leave Eloise one day, and didn't care how much he drank when he was with them. There were lots of women willing to go to bed with him, and he took advantage of them as often as he had time to. He never hesitated to seize an opportunity to cheat on her. Why should he?

He flew down the stairs and hailed a cab, and as he got into it, and it drove away, Eloise limped to the window, wearing one shoe, and watched him. There was no sorrow in her eyes, no regret for what she'd said, or what had happened. There was only anger and hatred on her face, and she had bruised her hip in the fall and was furious with him for it. So furious that her anger needed to vent itself, and there was only one place where she could do that. With a look of outrage she took off the other shoe and hurled it across the room, and walked on soundless feet out into the hallway. Everything she felt for him, or didn't, was in her eyes as she hurried down the hall to the familiar door, and all she knew as she walked into the darkened room was that she wanted to hurt him.

With a single gesture, she flipped the light on so she could see what she was doing, and ripped the covers off the small bed. It didn't deter her that there appeared to be no one there. She knew she was always there, hiding, just as evil and wicked and repulsive as her father. She was as disgusting as he was, and Eloise hated her with every ounce of her being as the small pink form was revealed, crouched in a little ball at the bottom of the bed, clutching her doll… the stupid doll his mother had given her and she clung to all the time… Eloise was in a blind rage as she grabbed it, and battered it against the wall, and broke off its head, as Gabriella came awake in a blinding flash and saw what she was doing.

“No, Mommy, no! Not Meredith!… No… Mommy, please…” Gabriella was sobbing as her mother destroyed the doll she had loved for years, and then Eloise turned to her daughter in the same white rage and began to hit her.

“It's just a stupid doll… and you're a wicked little brat… you dragged Marianne up to see you tonight, didn't you? And what did you tell her… did you cry to her… did you tell her about this? Did you tell her you deserve this… that you're a rotten little bitch… that you're a little whore, and Daddy and I hate you because you give us so much trouble?… Did you tell her we have to punish you because you're so bad to us… did you? Did you? DID YOU?” But Gabriella could no longer answer her, her sobs had been drowned by screams as her mother hit her again and again and again, at first with the body of the doll she had called Meredith, and then with her fists, battering her chest and her body and her ribs, pounding at her, ripping at her, grabbing handfuls of her hair and nearly tearing it off her head, and then slapping her until she couldn't catch her breath any longer. The blows were continuous and endless and brutal beyond belief. All her hatred for the child, and for John, the humiliation she had felt that night when he'd gone after the English girl, were visited on the child, who had no idea what she had done to deserve it, except that she knew that in some part of her she was so evil that surely she deserved her mother's hatred.