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“You are very kind, Lady Holt.”

“I am nothing of the kind. Have I not told you so before? I am fond of her, which is a great deal more dangerous.” She set a stitch. “Rosalind is fetching something from above-stairs that I do not in the least require. She will be down directly.”

Another stitch, laid with particular composure. “I shall be in the morning-room across the passage with the door standing open, hearing nothing whatever short of the house catching fire.”

“You are very good to me.”

“You have my leave, James, as you well know. You had it the day you stood with her before the whole room at the Stamfords’ ball.” Her needle did not pause. “The note was a formality, and we both know it.”

She rose then and gathered her work, but at the door she stopped and looked back at him. The dryness held, though something warmer moved beneath it.

“After her mother died, the people at Marbury learned to need her and forgot to make her feel wanted. Do you understand me?”

James inclined his head, though she went on before he could answer.

“I do not mean she was unloved. Cecily loved her from the first, and I have done my best since. But too many people praised the work and overlooked the woman doing it.” She let that rest a moment. “You are about to ask her for herself. Ask her well.”

“I mean to.”

“I know you do. It is why I am leaving the door open and going across the passage.” And she went.

James stood by the fire and waited, and his heart would not be still. Would she truly say yes? Had she not all but told him so already? Why, then, did his pulse race as though everything still hung upon the asking? Let me say it rightly, he thought. She has waited six-and-twenty years to hear it. Let me say it well.

Then he heard her on the stair, the light quick step of a woman coming down into a house where she was easy.

* * *

She came in with a shawl over her arm, saw him by the fire, and stopped just inside the door.

She did not go to a task. He had spent the whole Season learning her particular habits, chief among them that her hands would find a glove or a candlestick to tidy whenever a room came too near her heart. Now she only laid the shawl over the back of the nearest chair and crossed the room to him, her hands quiet at her sides. Gladness rose in him at the sight of it, warm as the fire at his back.

“Augusta has gone to write letters,” she remarked. “On Christmas Day. She has no letters to write.”

“No.”

“She left the door open, and took her good shawl, and left behind the very one she asked me to fetch.” A small pause. “You have got her leave, have you not?”

“I have got her leave.”

“Then you had better say it.” Her voice was not quite steady, and she did not try to make it so. “I have known for three days that this was coming, James, and I have run out of ways to be patient. Say it.”

So he said it. He did not kneel, and he did not dress it up in pretty speeches.

“I noticed you across a room at the very start of the Season, when nobody meant me to look at you,” he said. “I could not make you out then, and I have not been able to make you out since. I have read every room I ever entered, Rosalind, and been lonely for it. You are the one person I have never had to read.”

He took her hands in his. Tears gathered bright in her eyes, though she did not look away.

“I am not asking because you have bloomed and the Season has at last looked at you. I noticed you at your plainest, before the Season thought to look. There is no life worth the having that does not have you in it. Marry me.”

She did not flinch, and she did not turn aside to some useful task, as she had done her whole life when a feeling came too near. She stood and looked at him with bright eyes, and she let them be bright.

“You have not said the other thing,” she murmured. “I said it to you in a borrowed library, into the dark, before I had weighed whether it was safe.”

He remembered it well. He would remember it all his life.

“You kissed me and told me it broke nothing. That was kind, and true, but it was not the same thing.” Her chin lifted. “We agreed without a word that the saying of it belonged to Christmas, did we not? It is Christmas, James. Say your half.”

“I love you.”