They sat side by side for the remainder of the journey home in frigid silence.

Estelle had to keep swallowing against the lump in her throat. It had been another lovely day, though she had seen very little of her husband until the evening, when they had been in company. She had so hoped that they could get to the end of the day without trouble. She had hoped that he would come back to her that night so they might recapture the tenderness of the night before. And they had come so close.

She took his hand as he helped her from the carriage, and tilted her chin up at such an angle that he would know her unappeased. His jaw was set hard and his eyes were cold, she saw in one disdainful glance up at him.

He unlocked the door and stood aside to allow her to precede him into the hallway. Although the coachman had been necessarily kept up very late indeed, all the other servants were in bed. The Earl of Lisle refused to keep them up after midnight when he was perfectly capable of turning a key in a lock. He had explained his strange theories to his butler three years before, on his acquisition of the title and the town house.

Estelle waited in cold silence while he took her cloak and laid it on a hall stand, and picked up a branch of lit candles. But before she could reach out a hand to place on his sleeve so that he might escort her to her room, he set a warning hand on her arm and stood very still, in a listening attitude.

Estelle looked at him questioningly. He handed her the candlestick slowly and without a word, his eyes on a marble statue that stood to one side of the staircase, between the library and his study. A hand gesture told her that she was to stay exactly where she was. He moved silently toward the statue.

A child’s treble wailing broke the silence before the earl reached his destination. The sounds of a child whose heart was breaking.

“What are you doing here?” the earl asked, stopping beside the statue and looking down. His voice was not ungentle.

Estelle hurried across the tiles to his side. Nicky was standing between the statue and the wall, his fists pressed to his eyes, one bare foot scratching the other leg through his breeches.

“I was thirsty,” he said through his sobs. “I got lost.”

The earl stooped down on his haunches. “You wanted a drink of water?” he asked. “Did you not go down the back stairs to the kitchen? How do you come to be here?”

The sobs sounded as if they were tearing the child’s chest in two. “I got lost,” he said eventually.

“Nicky.” The earl reached out a hand and pushed back the boy’s hair from his forehead. “Why did you hide?”

“I got scared,” the boy said. “Are you goin’ ter beat me?” His fists were still pressed to his eyes.

“I told you yesterday that you would not be beaten here, did I not?” the earl said.

Estelle went down on her knees and set the candlestick on the tiled floor. “You are in a strange house and you are frightened,” she said.

“Poor little Nicky. But you are quite safe, you know, and we are not cross with you.” She took the thin, huddled shoulders in her hands and drew the child against her. She patted his back gently while his sobs gradually subsided. She glanced across at her husband. He was still stooped down beside her.

The sobs were succeeded by a noisy and prolonged yawn. The earl and his countess found themselves smiling with some amusement into each other’s eyes.

“Come on,” Estelle said, “we will take you back to your bed, and you shall have your drink.”

“I’ll take him, Estelle,” the earl said, and he stood up, scooping the small child into his arms as he did so. Nicky yawned again.

She picked up the candlestick and preceded them down the stone stairs to the kitchen for a cup of water and up the back stairs to the servants’ quarters and the little room that she had been to once the day before.

She helped a yawning Nicky off with his shirt and on with his nightshirt while her husband removed the child’s breeches.

She smoothed back his hair when he was lying in his bed, looking sleepily up at her. “Sleep now, Nicky,” she said softly. “You are quite safe here and must not be afraid of his lordship and me or of anyone else in the house. Good night.” She stooped down and kissed him on the cheek.

“Bring a cup to bed with you at nights,” the earl said, glancing to the washstand and its full jug of water. “And no more wanderings, Nicky. Go to sleep now. And there must be no more fear of beatings either.” He touched the backs of two fingers to the child’s cheek, and his lips twitched when a loud yawn was his only answer.

The yawning stopped abruptly when his door closed softly behind his new master and mistress. Nicky clasped his hands behind his head and stared rather glumly at the ceiling. Mags would kill him if he didn’t show up with something within the next few days. More to the point, there would be no money for his mother.

But he was, after all, only ten years old. And the hour was something after two in the morning. Sleep overtook him. She smelled like a garden, he thought as he drifted off. Or as he imagined a garden would smell. A really soft touch, of course, as was the governor, for all his stern looks. But she smelled like a garden for all that.

The Earl of Lisle had taken the candlestick from his wife’s hand. He held it high to light their way back to the main part of the house and their own rooms.

Estelle turned to face him when they entered her dressing room. Her eyes were soft and luminous, he saw. They had lost their cold disdain.

“Oh, Allan,” she said, “how my heart goes out to that child. Poor little orphan, with no one to love him and hug him and tuck him into his bed at night.”

“You were doing quite well a few minutes ago,” he said.

There were tears in her eyes. “His is so thin,” she said. “And he was so frightened. Thank you for being gentle with him, Allan. He did not expect you to be.”

“I would not imagine he knows a great deal about gentleness or kindness,” he said.

“He should not be working,” she said. “He should be playing. He should be carefree.”

He smiled. “Children cannot play all the time,” he said. “Even children of our class have their lessons to do. Mrs. Ainsford will not overwork him. If you fear it, you must have a word with her tomorrow.”

“Yes,” she said. “I will. How old do you think he is, Allan? He did not know when I asked him.”

“I think a little older than he looks,” he said. “I will see what I can do, Estelle. I need to make a few inquiries.”

Her face brightened. She smiled up at him. “For Nicky?” she said. “You will do something for him? Will you, Allan?”

He nodded and touched her cheek lightly with his knuckles as he had touched the child’s a few minutes before. “Good night,” he said softly, before taking one of the candles and going into his own dressing room.

He shut the door quietly behind him.

Estelle looked at the closed door before beginning to undress herself rather than summon her maid from sleep. She wished fleetingly that she had apologized for calling him a marble statue. He was not. He did have feelings. They had shown in his dealings with Nicky. But what was the point of apologizing? If she could not call him that in all truth, there were a hundred other nasty things she would call him when next he angered her. And his own words and suspicions were unpardonable.

She climbed into bed ten minutes later and tried not to think of the night before. Soon enough she would have to accustom herself to doing without altogether. She needed to sleep anyway. It was very late.

But even before she had found a totally comfortable position in which to lie and quieted her mind for sleep, the door of her dressing room opened and closed and she knew that after all she was not to be alone. Not for a while anyway.

And as soon as he climbed into the bed beside her and touched her face with one hand so that his mouth could find hers in the darkness, she knew that he had not come to her in anger. She put one arm about his strongly muscled chest and opened her mouth to his seeking tongue.

During the week before their guests began to arrive and the Christmas celebrations could begin in earnest, Estelle kept herself happily busy with preparations. Not that there was a great deal for her to do beyond a little extra shopping. She was not the one who cleaned the house from top to bottom or warmed the extra bedrooms and changed their bed linen and generally readied them for the reception of their temporary occupants. She was not the one who would cook and bake all the mounds of extra food.

But she did confer with Mrs. Ainsford about the allocation of rooms and with the cook on the organization of meals. And she insisted, the day before her parents were to arrive, and her husband’s mother, and a few of the other relatives, on decorating the drawing room herself with mounds of holly and crepe streamers and bows and a bunch of mistletoe.

The earl was called in to help, and it was generally he who was having to risk having all his fingers pricked to the bone, he complained, handling the holly and placing it and re-placing it while Estelle stood in the middle of the room, one finger to her chin, directing its exact placement.

But there was not a great deal of rancor in his complaints. There had been no more quarrels since the night of the concert. And Estelle seemed to be happy to be at home, aglow with the anticipation of Christmas. She smiled at him frequently. And he basked in her smiles, pretending to himself that it was he and not the festive season that had aroused them.

“Oh, poor Allan,” she said with a laugh after one particularly loud exclamation of protest as he pricked his finger on a holly leaf. “Do you think you will survive? I will kiss it better if you come over here.”