The man turned and walked away, his boot heels squeaking on the hard floor.
“You had better go and wait in there,” he said ungraciously, nodding his head in the direction of the visitors’ sitting room.
When he was alone inside the room, Lucius stood at the window looking out on the meadows beyond
and wishing he were anywhere else on earth but where he actually was. He was not in the habit of pursuing unwilling females, especially when the world was so full of willing ones. But it was too late to run away now.
He could hear the distant sounds of girlish laughter and a pianoforte playing—and then not playing. Across the meadow a group of girls, presumably from the school, was playing some organized game. The teacher supervising them looked like the auburn-haired one—Miss Osbourne. He had not noticed them when he arrived—which said something about his preoccupation. They were probably all shrieking their heads off.
When the door opened behind him, he half expected to turn and see Miss Martin again. But it was Frances herself, looking white to the very lips, who stepped inside. She closed the door behind her back.
“What are you doing here?” Her voice was actually shaking, but whether from shock or anger or some other emotion it was hard to say.
He knew something at that moment with ghastly clarity.
He was not going to be able to let her go this time.
It was that simple.
“I came to see you,” he said.
“Why?” Two spots of color had appeared in her cheeks. Her eyes had turned hard.
“Because there is something still to be said between us,” he said, “and I do not like to leave things unsaid when they should be spoken.”
“There is nothing else to be said between us, Lord Sinclair,” she said. “Nothing whatsoever.”
“There you are wrong, Frances,” he said. “Come out with me. Come walking in Sydney Gardens.”
“I am in the middle of giving a music lesson,” she told him.
“Dismiss the girl early,”he said. “She will be ecstatic. Do you have other lessons to follow this one?”
She compressed her lips for a moment before answering. “No,” she admitted.
“Then come walking with me,” he said.
“Have you noticed the weather today?” she asked him. “It is going to rain.”
“But it is not raining yet,” he said. “It may not rain all day—just as it did not snow all over Christmas. Bring an umbrella. You cannot claim to be English, Frances, and yet fear stepping outdoors lest it rain. You would be housebound all your life.”
“I do not want anything more to do with you,” she told him.
“If I thought you truly meant that,” he said, “I would be gone in a flash. But I think you lie. Or if you do not do so quite consciously, then I believe you deceive yourself.”
“You are a betrothed man,” she said. “Miss Portia Hunt—”
“I am not betrothed
“But you soon will be.”
“The future,” he said, “is just a theory, Frances. It is not fact. How can any of us know what we will be doing
“We do not—”
“You are such a coward, Frances.” He was beginning to feel frustrated, angry. Was she really going to refuse to come? And why the devil was he pressing her when she was so clearly reluctant to have any more dealings with him?
But he knew—he
“It is not cowardly,” she said, “to avoid inevitable and pointless pain.”
“I cause you pain, then?” His incipient anger disappeared in a moment. She had finally admitted to more than just a twinge.
But she would not answer him. She clasped her hands at her waist and looked composed and pale again. She gazed very steadily into his eyes.
“Give me one more hour of your life,” he said. “It is not a great deal to ask, is it?”
There was an almost imperceptible slumping of her shoulders and he knew that she would not deny him.
“One hour, then,” she said. “I will go and dismiss Rhiannon Jones and let Miss Martin know that I am going out for a while.”
He stared broodingly at the door after she had left the room. He ought, he supposed, to have stopped to think, to
But how could he have thought or considered? When he had left the house on
