“Perhaps because she is a lady,” he snapped back.
“And I am not,” she said, straightening her back. “Perhaps you had better move away, sir. I am about to murder your ears with my music again. Unless you want to turn the pages for me, of course. I suppose you can be a gentleman even if I am not a lady.”
“My right hand is occupied,” he said, indicating the crutch that he still held, “and my left hand is clumsy. But I will try.”
“Are you always going to have your crutches?” she asked. “You would have your hands free, would you not, if you had an artificial leg?”
“And I would doubtless fall flat on my face with every step I took,” he said. “I think not, Miss Simpson. Other people can find some other spectacle with which to amuse themselves.”
“Did it ever cross your mind,” she asked, “that other people might have better things to do with their time than stare at you?”
“Meaning that I have a false sense of my own importance,” he said. “Thank you, ma’am. You are always so very pleasant.”
“There is nothing forcing you to stay here,” she said, beginning to play, and finding that every finger was on the wrong note. But she played valiantly on. “I can turn my own pages, thank you very much. And you see? I am playing abominably and no one is noticing. It is a foolish and a conceited thing to imagine that everyone’s attention is focused on oneself.”
“Oh, my dear,” Mrs. Carrington called, smiling kindly and nodding from the other end of the room, “that is a difficult piece of music, is it not? Would you like Anna to help you find something simpler?”
“No, thank you, ma’am,” Jennifer called back, lifting her fingers from the keyboard immediately. “I have just finished.”
She looked at the lieutenant out of the corner of her eye, and the next moment they were both bent forward behind the music rest, tortured by smothered laughter.
“Let me try it,” he said, “and see if I can do a little better.”
All of Jennifer’s amusement fled. “Oh,” she said, “I suppose you are an accomplished musician, and I shall end up feeling doubly mortified?”
He did not say anything, but slid along the bench when she rose to stand behind him. He answered her question by playing the piece without a single error and-worse-by making sheer music of it.
She was very glad to see Madeline strolling across the room toward them. She was thereby released from the necessity of making some comment when he had finished.
“You play so well, Allan,” Madeline said when he had finished, one hand resting on his shoulder. “You are a real musician.”
“I have something to amuse myself with, you see,” he said, “even if I cannot indulge in more manly pursuits.”
“What a good thing it is,” she said, “that you have real talent.”
Jennifer admired Madeline’s endless cheerfulness and patience. She would have retorted that of course it was considerably more manly to play cricket, chasing a hard ball around a field for a number of hours, than to create beauty with one’s hands. And her own tone would have been quite as heavily sarcastic as his had been when he spoke to Madeline.
What a horrid man he was, she thought. And felt guilty at her own intolerance. He had suffered a great deal. And he had made a fast physical recovery from his injuries. It was all very well for her, with two arms, two legs, and two eyes, to criticize. She would do well to learn from Madeline, to become more ladylike and more compassionate.
“Are you tired, Allan?” Madeline was asking. “Shall I help you to your room? I will make your excuses to Alexandra. She will not mind at all.”
“Yes, I will withdraw,” he said. “But I can manage quite well on my own, thank you, Madeline. And I will stop in at the drawing room to bid Lady Amberley good night. Miss Simpson?” He nodded curtly to Jennifer.
“IT WAS NICELY DONE,” Ellen said when she was standing with Lord Eden out on the terrace. “I could scarcely say no in front of your sister-in-law and her friend, could I? And I suppose we are to take a different direction in the formal gardens from that being taken by the others?”
The other four were making their way along the gravel walks in the direction of a stone fountain at the north end of the gardens.
“Precisely,” he said. “Take my arm, Ellen, and let us relax and enjoy the coolness of the evening for a time. My anger has cooled too since the last time we spoke. I am not planning either to shake you or to beat you, if that is what you are afraid of.”
“I am not afraid,” she said. “I am not afraid of you, Dominic.”
They walked along the paths; the sound of their own footsteps and the faint sounds of the conversation of the other group were the only things to break the silence. They were making their way toward the companion fountain of the other, at the south end of the garden.
He broke the silence at last, when they had rounded the fountain and were out of sight of the others. He set his back to the stone basin and crossed his arms on his chest.
“Well, Ellen,” he said, “I have something to say to you.”
“Yes,” she said. She was facing away from him, looking along the valley.
“It is not, perhaps, what you expect,” he said. He laughed softly. “My brother has told me in no uncertain terms that I will not harass you while you are a guest in his home. Besides, I have had time to think. Time for both shock and anger to have receded.”
She said nothing. She continued to gaze along the darkened valley.
“Ellen,” he said, “I know that it is my child you are expecting. We both know that. And I want to have some say in the future course of my son’s or my daughter’s life. But there will be time for that. Time for arguments and quarrels. It is not an urgent matter. The child is safe with you for another six months. A mere father is very irrelevant in that time.”
She turned to look into the shadows where he was standing.
“I liked you, Ellen,” he said. “I don’t know of a woman whom I have more admired and respected. You are a very strong person. There was a peace and a comfort in your presence. I did not fully realize at the time that you were part of the reason why I liked to come home with Charlie. I think you liked me too. You always made me welcome. You never made me feel that I was intruding. You never made me feel foolish when I fell asleep in your rooms. You used to laugh at me, and at Charlie. What happened to our friendship?”
“You know very well what happened to it,” she said. “We destroyed it. Together. I don’t blame you any more than I blame myself.”
“By sleeping together,” he said. “By turning to each other for physical comfort when we should have contented ourselves with emotional comfort.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Three years,” he said, “balanced against six days. Should we let a bitterness, an estrangement, stand between us when we had three years of friendship and only six days of the other?”
“I can’t look at you without remembering,” she said. “I can’t just pretend it did not happen.”
“But there is a friendship even apart from that,” he said. “There was even during those days, Ellen. It would be wrong of us to remember it only as a physical passion. I want to know you again. I want to know what you have been through during the past few months. I want to become your friend again during your weeks here. Do you think it is possible? And before you answer, I want to tell you this. If you say no, I will leave here tomorrow. That is a firm promise.”
“Dominic!” She came toward him, and stopped a few feet away. “I don’t know if it is possible. I don’t know.”
“Are you willing to try?” he asked.
She bit her lip. “I don’t know.”
“Do you want me to go away?”
“No,” she whispered. She stared at him in the darkness. “But I cannot promise ever to be comfortable with you. I cannot promise that we will ever be friends again.”
“I can’t either,” he said, and he reached out to brush the backs of his knuckles along her jawline. “But I want
