What he ought to do was get to his feet and hurry off back to the house and never return. If he had imagined a pleasant, mindless sort of dalliance with her, even perhaps a brief affair, he was beginning to realize that nothing would be simple and straightforward with Mrs. Agnes Keeping. He did not want to be her one chance at passion, her one experiment at breaking free of the dull mold of her life. Heaven help him. He did not want to leave her with regret that she had given in to the temptation to explore passion. He did not want to break her heart—ifhe had the power to do that.
This... tryst was not developing at all as he had imagined when he devised a way of coming here to find her.
Suddenly, and quite unfairly, he resented her. And this place and the change of venue this year. Nothing like this ever happened at Penderris.
He got abruptly to his feet and stood by the door, gazing along the length of the cedar avenue.
“You will paint tomorrow?” he asked her.
“I do not know.”
And he did just what he had told himself he ought to do. He opened the door and stepped outside, stood undecided for a few moments, and then strode off down the avenue without her.
If he had turned back, he might have made love to her. And she would not have stopped him, idiot woman. At least he did not think she would.
Perhaps tomorrow...
And perhaps not.
He needed time to think.
***
Agnes worked at home for the next week. She painted the daffodils from memory, even though she really was almost sick of them, and she was pleased with her very first effort. Indeed she was quite sure it was the best work she had ever done. Surprisingly, she found herself painting them from above, as though she were the sun looking down on them. There was no sky in the painting, only grass and flowers.
Time crawled by when she was not painting, and sometimes even when she was. She could not see the Middlebury Park visitors leaving quickly enough. Perhaps her peace would be restored when they had gone away.
Whenhehad gone away.
She wasneveragain going to make the mistake of falling in love. It was an emotional state that was supposed to bring great happiness, even euphoria. She had felt almost none of either. Of course, poetry and literature in general were full of stories of tragic love lost or spurned. She ought to have taken more notice when she was reading. Except that caution would not have helped her. She had had no intention whatsoever of falling in love with Viscount Ponsonby, who was unsuitable and ineligible in almost every imaginable way. She missed William with a dull ache of longing for the plodding contentment of their life together.
WouldLord Ponsonby’s leaving bring her peace?
Once in, when did one fall out of love? It had taken several weeks back in October—though it seemed the feeling had merely lain dormant instead of going away altogether. How long would it take this time? And when would it be gone forever?
And why had he let a whole week—no, eight days—go by without seeking her out? Every time she heard a horse on the street or a knock on the door, she held her breath and waited, hoping it was not him. Hoping it was.
And then, on the morning of the eighth day, Sophia sent Agnes a note apologizing abjectly for so neglecting her friend and begging both Agnes and Miss Debbins to come and take tea with her and the other two wives.
I have a new story with new illustrations to show you,she had written.We told it to Thomas, and he gurgled. I showed him the pictures and he almost smiled.
Agnes did smile as she folded the note. Thomas was not even two months old.
“We are invited to Middlebury for tea with Sophia and two of the lady guests,” she told Dora when her sister had finished giving a music lesson to a twelve-year-old who had had the misfortune to be born with ten thumbs and an incurably prosaic soul—or so said Dora with growing exasperation almost every week. And with doting parents who were tone-deaf and determined to believe that their daughter was a prodigy.
“Oh, that will be delightful,” Dora said, brightening. “And it will be good for you. You have been in the mopes lately.”
“Oh, I have not,” Agnes protested. She had been making a determined effort to appear cheerful.
Tea in the drawing room at Middlebury Park really was just for the three married ladies and their two guests. Lady Barclay had gone off somewhere with the other six members of the club, Sophia reported.
“I was afraid,” she said, “that coming here this year instead of going to Penderris Hall as usual, and having three wives here too this time, would spoil things for them, but I do not believe it has.”
“Ben told me last night when he finally came to bed,” Lady Harper said with her slight trace of a Welsh accent, “that this gathering with his friends has been the very best part of his honeymoon so far. And then he had the grace to do some smart verbal scrambling to assure me that it isentirelybecause I am with him this year.”
They all laughed.
Sophia read the new story aloud at the request of Lady Trentham, and the illustrations were passed from hand to hand so that they could all admire and chuckle over them.
