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“It was real. It will never once be turned on you.” Augusta’s gaze came up. “Do not make the mistake of thinking, because you have seen her fear, that you have seen anything that will spare you.”

“I had not thought to be spared.” Rosalind watched her aunt’s face. “Aunt. Why does she look at me so?”

She had not meant to ask it. The cold Selina turned upon the world was an even cold, the same for everyone. The cold she turned upon Rosalind had an edge in it she kept for no one else.

Augusta was quiet, and it was not her usual quiet. It was a silence her aunt went into and shut behind her.

“She has decided to dislike you,” Augusta said at last. “You outrank her girls. You ran the house she means to be mistress of. That is reason enough for her.”

“That is not all of it.”

“It is enough of it for you to go on.”

Augusta took up her cup again, and the glance she gave over the rim went a half-degree past Rosalind, toward the dark window glass, toward something that was not in the room at all.

“Let it alone, child,” she said, gently. “Some sums come out the worse the longer one stares at them, and you have an eye for the other kind, so you have never learned to leave such a one be. Leave it be. She is a frightened woman who has chosen you to be frightened of. That is yours to carry, and nothing more, and it is enough.”

“You are not telling me a thing.”

“I am telling you to drink your tea before it is stone cold, and to stop reading my face, which you do entirely too well and entirely without my leave.” The dryness came back into her voice, but it came late, and Rosalind heard the half-beat where it should have been and was not. “There is nothing beneath it but an old woman’s tiredness and a younger woman’s spite, and neither is worth your evening. Now. Tell me of the basket-making, for Phoebe was to be there, was she not? Did the Danforth boy contrive to be useful, or only to be present?”

It was kindly meant, and Rosalind saw plainly what it was besides. It was a door shut very gently in her face, by the one person in the world who had never once shut a door on her. She let it shut. There was a thing her aunt would not name, and the not-naming frightened her more than any naming could have done. Whatever it is, it frightens her, Rosalind thought. And nothing frightens my aunt.

Rosalind picked up her tea and drank it, though it had gone nearly cold.

“He was useful,” she said, “and present, and a good deal too plain-spoken for Miss Phoebe’s comfort, and I believe it is doing her a great deal of good. I shall tell you the whole story.”

So she told her aunt everything, warm and ordinary as it was, and her aunt listened and laughed in all the right places.

Chapter Twelve

Dover liked the Danforths’ long room the moment he stepped into it, for it was full of candlelight and laughter rather than ceremony. Greenery hung wherever hands could reach it, and somebody near the fire tuned a fiddle with far more goodwill than skill.

Lady Rosalind came down on her aunt’s arm in dark green, giving the room the quick, careful survey she gave every room she entered. When it crossed him, it stopped. “Lord Dover,” she said, and the company carried her on, though she glanced back once and found him still watching her.

He took up his usual station at the cold end of the long table, which was how his eye came to rest on Miss Phoebe Faulkner when the thing happened. She sat with Mr. Danforth at the far end, threading dried orange slices onto a length of twine, and she looked brighter than Dover had ever seen her. The Countess had not come, and a sister was not a mother.

“You have threaded six while I have threaded two,” Mr. Danforth said, “and yours are straight. Mine are not.”

“That is hardly my fault, sir.”

“Is it not? I begin to suspect, Miss Phoebe, that you have been managing me. You let me believe I was helping.”

“You are helping.” She paused, and Dover saw the old habit in it, warmth checking itself before it was allowed out. Then it came through all the same. “You are helping a very little, while I let you believe it is a great deal.”

“And why should you do that?”

“Because that is what one does at Christmas, is it not? One may be useless all the year and call it festive in December.”

Danforth laughed, an open and easy laugh which hid nothing, and half a room away Dover felt his own mouth curve.

“There,” Danforth said. “That is the second whole opinion you have given me tonight. You did not look about first to see whether you were permitted it, either. I have been counting.”

“You count my opinions?”

“I count everything you do not let yourself say, and it is a great many things.” He set down his orange slice and looked at her with nothing held back. “You need not ration them with me, Miss Phoebe. I shall not repeat a word to anyone.”

She said nothing, though her fingers had gone still upon the twine.