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You forgive me if I made a mistake before, but we were never properly introduced.”
    “We weren’t,” Pierre agreed, with his customary suaveness. “But a penniless vicomte finds it less complicated to forget that he has a title, Miss Pentland!”
    Eunice smiled, her brilliant, caressing smile.
    “I think you must be referring to days that are done with, Vicomte! We all know how your aunt adored you, and how eagerly she awaited your visits. All too infrequent, if you’ll forgive me for sounding just a little critical now that our dear old friend has gone?”
    “I forgive you,” Pierre answered, his eyes glinting with amusement. “But you shouldn’t leap to conclusions, Miss Pentland. You could be in for a surprise!”
    Eunice’s dark eyebrows elevated themselves, but she remembered her excellent manners in time, and explained hastily why she had come.
    “David and I are both agreed that you must come to us, Chloe,” she said earnestly. “We simply will not accept a refusal! You can’t prevent the Vicomte from occupying his own house, and it wouldn’t look quite right if you occupied it together, would it?”
    “I wonder if you have the least idea how wrong you are?” Pierre murmured, and then turned to Chloe. “I think it would be an excellent plan if you accepted Miss Pentland’s offer of hospitality, Chloe,” he told her. “It is lonely for you here, and for the time being we can’t be together.”
    “For the time being?” Eunice caught him up quickly. Her blue eyes grew bright and sharp with curiosity. “But Chloe will have to find another job.”
    “Not necessarily,” Pierre returned, looking her over almost indolently. She was wearing a dress of heavy white silk, and all her accessories were expensive and white. Her jewellery was chunky and gold, and the bracelets on her wrists suggested costly fetters. “As a matter of fact, I think it is very unlikely that Chloe will have another job. We are thinking of getting married very soon, which is precisely what my aunt wished us to do!”
    “Now I know I’m expected to smile at a jok e— ” Eunice said, perfunctorily doing that very thing. "So far as I'm aware, you and Chloe hardly know one another.”
    “My dear Miss Pentland,” the man reproved her suavely, “would I be likely to go in for jokes on the day that my aunt was removed to the churchyard? It would be in execrable taste, wouldn’t it? Particularly as it was her wish that we would marry very speedily!”
    Chloe started to say something, but he laid his fingers on her arm and gripped it with steely strength. A looker-on would have received the impression that he was merely gently grasping it, but Chloe could have winced from the pain of those encompassing fingers.
    “These things happen suddenly,” he explained to the astounded visitor. “Sometimes very suddenly! Ten days ago Chloe and I had never even met, but once we did meet we recognised the futility of trying to avoid something that was inevitable. My aunt could not have been more delighted, and I think she died happy in the knowledge that we would live here together at Trelas. And, in order that we can live here together at Trelas, we must go through the essential formalities without any loss of time!”
    Eunice stared at him so strangely that Chloe was certain—for one long-drawn-out moment, at least—that she was not taken in. Then, recovering completely from her surprise, she offered them her gloved hand and her congratulations.
    “But how wonderful!” she exclaimed. “On such a sad day, it quite cheers me up to hear such news! Completely unexpected, as I’m afraid I’ve already rather given away!” She wagged a finger at Chloe. “You’re a deep one, my dear—an astonishingly deep one. To catch a man so quickly! I’ d never have believed you were the type. I don’t know what David’s going to say... ”
    “Eunice, I—” Chloe was beginning, but Pierre interrupted her.
    “David is your brother?” he