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Behind her, Annabel sneezed. “Jane, you should go down, unless you want Allegra to have all the gentlemen to herself.”

Jane slid the panel back into place, secured the latch, and reminded Annabel to tell no one.

* * * *

Once past the beleaguered butler, Hazelwood took care to draw no attention to himself. He avoided any encounter with his hostess and her family, kept mainly to the window embrasures, and let his gaze slide away from anyone who gave him a puzzled glance of partial recognition.

An hour passed in which he listened to a florid Italian soprano, studied the pattern of Lady Strayde’s carpet, and looked for Jane in the crowd. He wasted no thought on the painting. He had seen from the stairs that they would not have an opportunity to steal it at present. He might make Uncle Thaddeus a loan.

Waiters ignored him, and over-warm guests passed rather closer to one another than all but the most licentious waltz permitted. Every ingénue looked the same. In his outcast state, he had forgotten the tyranny of fashion, which dictated a uniformity of dress for respectable young women that made them nearly indistinguishable. A Broadwind pianoforte, as yet untouched, told him the evening was far from over.

He spotted Jane at last in the interval after the soprano’s performance. She and Allegra shared opposite ends of a striped green and gold silk sofa. Allegra managed no fewer than four admirers from her end of the sofa with the cool command of a colonel of the line. Young men brought her refreshments, or held her fan, or gestured extravagantly to capture her flickering attention. At the opposite end of the sofa Jane talked quietly with a ginger-haired fellow, Cecil Eversley, who had her unwavering attention, and who, in Hazelwood’s opinion, would never do as a husband for Jane.

Hazelwood had not taken her husband hunting seriously, or he had not believed that she took it seriously. But now that she was out in the world where other men were free to admire her, to discover that gleam in her eye when she was about to say something sharp, he feared a husband might find her. Her thick hair was up, her slender neck and the hollows at the base of her throat, exposed. The customary white dress looked as substantial as a cloud.

He wanted to tell Allegra’s admirers that they had the wrong end of the sofa, but he realized that young men inevitably chose the wrong end of the sofa, as he had done years earlier.

* * * *

Jane had no idea where Hazelwood had gone. Once again he had entered a party, this time in violation of the agreement they’d made, where his hosts were likely to toss him out rather than offer him a seat of honor.

The rooms were crowded with guests, most of them in motion in the interval after the soprano. From her position at the end of Allegra’s sofa Jane could see little beyond the skirts and waistcoats of passing guests. The young man Annabel admired, Cecil Eversley, had looked so downcast at Allegra’s coldness that Jane had spoken to him.

“You like dogs, I hear,” she had said.

He had brightened at once, and they had been talking ever since. To be honest, he had done most of the talking, but that had left her brain free to worry about what Hazelwood might be up to. He was not supposed to enter the house. He was to collect Jane at the end of the evening. That was the plan. He had spoken in jest about stealing the painting, and she hoped he would not attempt the impossible. But he had already gone beyond what they’d agreed to by entering the party.

She widened her smile and gave Eversley a reply to help his story of one of his dogs giving birth to a large litter of puppies. Poor man. He had all the qualities her guide admired, yet he’d never be a favored suitor as long as Allegra was doing the choosing. She wondered whether he would wait to choose a wife until Annabel’s three years, seven months, and three days expired, and she tried to remember what the Husband Hunter’s Guide said about persistence.

It occurred to her that if she were truly hunting a husband, she would choose very differently from the man in front of her. She would choose a man who was competent and fearless, indifferent to opinion, and inclined to confront authority rather than bow to it.

In the next moment Lady Strayde called on Allegra to display her musical accomplishments. Allegra stood. Eversley stopped speaking. His gaze swung from Jane to Allegra. She smiled at her other admirers and turned to Eversley. His face colored, a stunned look of pleasure came into his eyes, and he stuck out both his elbows, like a bird preparing for flight. With a toss of her head and a swift punishing glance at Jane, Allegra seized Eversley’s arm and hauled him toward the pianoforte. Her followers hurried after her, and a general rearrangement of guests and chairs left Jane alone. She supposed she should be downcast, but she felt relieved to be alone.

She was thinking about that look in Eversley’s eyes when a tug on her right wrist made her turn and glance over her shoulder. Hazelwood had her by the arm and pulled her between the heavy velvet curtains at the edge of a deep window embrasure. “Figured out yet how to get your uncle’s painting back?”

“As a matter of fact, I have.” She turned resolutely toward Allegra as the girl began to play. The guests now occupied irregular rows of little gilt chairs facing the pianoforte.

“You’re not going to tell me?”

She disengaged her hand. “I’m not, because you should not be here, and my cousins must not see you.”

“Thanks to the wonders of English architecture, I’ve been invisible these past two hours.”

“We agreed that you were to collect me later.” They had agreed that it was unlikely that an assailant would strike at her while Allegra Walhouse played the pianoforte. She wondered what had prompted him to change his plan. Now he took her by the shoulders and shifted her position. “If you stand here, just so, no one will see me.”

“If you had an ounce of common sense, you would—”

“Stick to the plan? How dull! You don’t like dull men.”

“Don’t I? I quite enjoyed talking with Cecil Eversley just now.”

“Did you? Should I tell you how that exchange looked to me?”

She shook her head. He was far too perceptive.

“I think I must in the interest of your husband hunting plans. There was Eversley, prosing on, probably about his dogs. He’s famous for talking about them. There you were, with polite and perhaps even kindly indulgence, letting him tell you about some mastiff’s pedigree and the animal’s astonishing cleverness, with your hands folded in your lap and your lips fixed in a bland smile just short of rigor mortis.”

She laughed and drew a sharp reproving glance from a turbaned matron, even as she felt Hazelwood tug the blue ribbons dangling from her high waist and pull her farther back into the deep window embrasure. Jane had a feeling she was violating all the rules her guide recommended.