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“I am so, so sorry,” she said eventually, her voice husky. She pulled back from him, wiping at her face with the heels of her hands. “I cannot remember such a thing happening before. I never weep. Except at weddings.”

Not even when her father died? It was a chilling thought. How much had she bottled up inside herself all these years?

He handed her his handkerchief, and she dried her eyes and her cheeks with it and turned her face away while she blew her nose and stuffed the handkerchief beneath the folds of her parasol and the pins from her hair.

“I am so sorry,” she said again. “I was nine years old, and my hair had been put up for the first time in a style similar to what I did for Katy a few days ago. I was so proud of myself. I thought I looked very grown up even though my baby fat was still with me. It was the happiest night of my life for I was at a ball with all my family. All my brothers—except Owen—were grown up and terribly handsome, and Pippa was the prettiest girl in the whole neighborhood, but I had the most beautiful hair of anyone in the family.” She laughed, a sort of mournful chuckle. “How could that and the end of the world happen on the same night?”

“Your father died that night?” he asked, picturing the late earl crumpling or crashing to the ballroom floor in the middle of a dance, felled by a massive heart seizure.

“Oh, no.” She shook her head and got to her feet. “That did not happen until four years later.” She pushed her hair impatiently from her face, and it fell down her back to the tops of her legs.

“Enough of that for now,” she said. “I cannot tell you the whole story. Not today. Not unless you have a pile of a few dozen dry handkerchiefs hidden somewhere about your person. And not even then. One day I will tell you, if you want to hear.”

“I do,” he said, getting to his feet too.

She turned her head to smile fleetingly at him. Her face was blotched red. Her eyes and her lips looked slightly swollen.

“But…” she said. “Ought I to have it trimmed?”

He could not resist half grinning at her. “I would not touch that question even under the threat of torture,” he said.

“Wise man.” She chuckled. “He would tell me to do it, would he not? No, make that a statement rather than a question. He would. So, tell me, Bertrand. Was he right? Do I have the most beautiful hair in my family? You know Pippa. And you know Mama.”

“Well, Nicholas has enviable hair,” he said, and had the satisfaction of seeing laughter in her eyes. “But you have the most beautiful hair of any woman I know, Stephanie. More than that, though, you are the most beautiful woman I have ever known.”

“Oh.” She looked startled and then laughed. And then sobered again. “After that exhibition of tears? I must look a mess.”

“Especially with your flushed face and swollen eyes,” he said. “Most women would be hiding their faces until they returned to normal. Not you, though. You are not afraid to show yourself as you are. That makes you incredibly attractive.”

She tipped her head to one side and regarded him for a moment before replying.

“You are remarkably adept with words,” she said. “Do you practice at night when you should be sleeping?”

“Ah, my secret unmasked,” he said. “I speak what I believe, Stephanie. I do not deliver courtly speeches.”

“Then thank you,” she said. “You are kind. You see? You are not advancing your case at all. You merely keep proving to me that you are indeed perfect. Or perhaps just blind. You have seen my hair. May I put it back up now?”

He wanted to run his hands through it—as he had not done when he held her earlier. He wanted to hold her as he had not held her then. He wanted to kiss her again as he had at Vauxhall, but without the anger that had been mixed with the passion on that occasion. And the setting was perfect. Unfortunately, the timing was not.

“Do you need help?” he asked.

“Do you have experience?” she asked him.

“No,” he said.

“Not with your sister?”

“No,” he said.

“Then, as tactfully as I can, may I say thank you but no thanks?” she said.

“Even if I sulk?” he said.

“Even then.”

He drew such hope from the fact that they could joke and banter with each other even at a time like this. And that she had trusted him enough to take down her hair for him and thus reveal one of her deepest, most painful secrets to him. He doubted she had ever done so with anyone else.

She sat back down on the grass, and he joined her there again and watched while she braided and coiled her hair and secured the plaits in place with the pins.