This morning she was a coward. This morning she could not tell him.

She had arranged to go shopping with her friend Isabella Lawrence. There were all sorts of Christmas gifts to be purchased before their houseguests began to arrive to take up all her time. There was Allan’s gift to be chosen, and she did not know what she would get him. She did have one gift for him already, of course. She had persuaded Lord Humber, that elderly miser, to part with a silver snuffbox Allan had admired months before, and she had kept it as a Christmas gift. But that had been a long time ago. And Lord Humber had refused to take anything but a token payment. Besides, she had given him a snuffbox the year before too. She wanted something else, something very special. But what did one buy for a man who had everything? Still, she would enjoy the morning despite the problem. Isabella could always cheer her up with her bright chatter and incessant gossiping.

She ate her breakfast in lone state, her husband having already removed to his study, Stebbins told her. She did not know whether to be glad or sorry.

But there was one thing she had to do before going out. She had Annie bring Nicky to her dressing room.

She smiled at him when he stood inside the door, his chin tucked against his chest, one leg wrapping itself around the other. He was clean and dressed smartly in the livery of the house. But he was still, of course, pathetically thin and endearingly small.

“Good morning, Nicky,” she said.

He muttered something into the front of his coat.

She crossed the room in a rush, stooped down in front of him, and set her hands on his thin shoulders. “Did you have a good breakfast?” she asked. “And did you sleep well?”

“Yes, missus,” he said. “I mean…”

“That is all right,” she said, lifting a hand to smooth back his hair.

“You do look splendid. Such shiny blond hair. Are you happy, Nicky, now that you have a real home of your own?”

“Yes, missus,” he said, sniffing and drawing his cuff across his nose.

“Nicky,” she said, “I lost a ring yesterday. In my bedchamber. You did not see it there when you came down the chimney, I suppose?”

The child returned his foot to the floor and scratched the back of his leg with his other heel.

“No, of course you did not,” she said, putting her arms about his thin little body and hugging him warmly. “Oh, Nicky, his lordship gave me the ring when we were betrothed. And now I have lost it. It was without question my most precious possession. Like the lock of your mama’s hair is to you. And the seashell.” She sighed. “But no matter. Something else very precious came into my life yesterday. Even more precious perhaps because it is living.” She smiled at his bowed head and kissed his cheek. “You came into my life, dear. I want you to be happy here. I want you to grow up happy and healthy. There will never be any more chimneys, I promise you. His lordship would not allow it.”

Nicky rubbed his chin back and forth on his chest and rocked dangerously on one leg.

“Annie is waiting outside for you,” Estelle said. “She will take you back to the kitchen, and Mrs. Ainsford will find you jobs to do. But nothing too hard, I assure you. Run along now. I shall buy you a present for Christmas while I am out. And I will not add ‘if you are good.’ I shall give you a gift even if you are not good. Everyone should have a Christmas gift whether he deserves it or not.”

Nicky looked up at her for the first time, with eyes that seemed far too large for his pale, thin face. Then his hand found the doorknob and opened the door. He darted out to join the waiting maid.

Estelle tied the strings of her bonnet beneath her chin and knew what she was going to buy for her husband for Christmas. It was not really a gift for him, she supposed. But it would do. It would be the best she could do, and perhaps after she had gone away into her banishment he would understand why she had chosen to give him such a strange gift.

Perhaps-oh, just perhaps-her exile would not last a lifetime.

The Earl of Lisle felt very guilty. He had often accused his wife of flirting, on the basis of very hard evidence he had seen with his own eyes. He had a few times accused her of doing more than flirting. She had always hotly denied the charges, though she had usually ended the arguments with a toss of the head and that look of disdain and the comment that he might believe what he pleased. And who, apart from him, would blame her anyway for taking a lover, when she was tied for the rest of a lifetime to such a husband?

He had never looked for evidence. And it was not because he was afraid of what he might discover. Rather it was out of a deep conviction that even though he was her husband, he did not own her. Although in the eyes of the law she was his possession, he would never look on her as such.

She was Estelle. His wife. The woman he had secretly loved since before his marriage to her. And if she chose to flirt with other men, if she chose to be unfaithful to him with one or more of those men, then he would rant and rave and perhaps put her away from him forever. But he would never spy on her, never publicly accuse her, never publicly disown her.

He would endure if he must, as dozens of wives were expected to endure when their husbands chose to take mistresses.

It was with the greatest of unease, then, that he searched his wife’s rooms after she had left on her shopping trip with Isabella Lawrence. He was looking for the ring. He was terrified of finding something else.

Something that he did not want to find.Something that would incriminate her and destroy him.

He found nothing. Nothing to confirm some of his worst suspicions. And not the ring either. Wherever she had put it, it certainly was not in either her bedchamber or her dressing room.

It seemed to him, as he wandered through into his own dressing room, that he must now abandon the plan that had so delighted him the night before. But not necessarily so, he thought after a while. The diamond would have been new anyway. Why not the whole ring? Why not have the whole thing copied for her? A wholly new gift.

A wholly new love offering.

The trouble was, of course, that he would have to describe the ring very exactly to a jeweler in order that it could be duplicated. He had bought the ring for her two years before. He had put it on her hand. He had looked at it there, with mingled pride and love and despair, a thousand times and more. And yet he found that he could not be clear in his mind whether there had been eight sapphires or nine. And exactly how wide had the gold band been?

He tried sketching the ring, but he had never been much of an artist.

He would have to do the best he could. After all, it was not as if he were going to try to pretend to her that it was the original ring.

The idea of the gift excited him again. Perhaps he would even be able to explain to her when he gave it. Explain why he had done it, what the ring meant to him. What she meant to him.

Perhaps. Perhaps if he did so she would look at him in incomprehension.

Or with that look of disdain.

Or perhaps-just perhaps-with a look similar to the one she had given him the day before, after he had told the little climbing boy that he would be staying with them.

He would go immediately, he decided. The ring would have to be made specially. And there were less than two weeks left before Christmas. He must go without delay.

He decided on eight sapphires when the moment came to give directions to the jeweler he had chosen. And he picked out a diamond that looked to him almost identical to the Star of Bethlehem. And left the shop on Oxford Street feeling pleased with the morning’s work and filled with a cautious hope for the future. Christmas was coming. Who would not feel hopeful at such a season of the year?

But his mood was short-lived. As he walked past the bow windows of a confectioner’s shop, he turned his head absently to look inside and saw his wife sitting at a table there with Lady Lawrence. And with Lord Martindale and Sir Cyril Porchester. Estelle’s face was flushed and animated. She was laughing, as were they all.

She did not see him. He walked on past.

Estelle, inside the confectioner’s shop, stopped laughing and shook her head at the plate of cakes that Sir Cyril offered to her. “What a perfectly horrid thing to say,” she said to Lord Martindale, her eyes still dancing with merriment. “As if I would buy Allan an expensive gift and have the bill sent to him.”

“There are plenty of wives who do just that, my dear Lady Lisle,” he said.

“I save my money for Christmas,” she said, “so that I can buy whatever I want without having to run to Allan.”

“But you still refuse to tell us what you are going to buy him, the lucky man?” Sir Cyril asked.

“Absolutely,” she said, bright-eyed and smiling. “I have not even told Isabella. It is to be a surprise. For Allan alone.”

Lord Martindale helped himself to another cake. “One would like to know what Lisle had done to deserve such devotion, would one not, Porchester?”

Estelle patted him lightly on the arm. “He married me,” she said, and looked at Lady Lawrence and laughed gaily.

“Oh, unfair, ma’am,” Lord Martindale said. “Since he has already done so, you see, the rest of us poor mortals are unable to compete.”

“We could find some excuse to slap a glove in his face and shoot him,”

Sir Cyril said.

They all laughed.

“But I should not like that at all,” Estelle said. “I would be an inconsolable widow for the rest of my life, I warn you.”

“In that case,” Sir Cyril said with a mock sigh, getting to his feet and circling the table in order to pull out Lady Lawrence’s chair, “I suppose we might as well allow Lisle to live. Lucky devil!”