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Lady Bartlett often hid her face in shame at Caroline’s unladylike behavior when she came across a team in bearing reins, which were so popular with the more fashion-conscious members of her set, and of which she strongly disapproved.
    Braden Granville, however, had not put his team in bearing reins, which caused Caroline to say, approvingly, “Very nice,” before she remembered that she didn’t want to think about Braden Granville anymore. She almost said so out loud, but her mother beat her to the chase.
    “Braden Granville, Braden Granville, Braden Granville!” The Dowager Lady Bartlett, pushing testily at her crinoline, which her son’s antics had set askew, let out an exasperated sigh. “Can’t you speak of someone else for a change, Thomas? I am sick to death of hearing about Braden Granville.”
    “Hear, hear,” Caroline said. And, at the time, she quite meant it, too.
    3

    A s it happened, Lady Caroline Linford and her mother were not the only people sick of hearing about Braden Granville. Braden Granville himself was a bit tired of hearing about Braden Granville.
    When, the following morning, he opened up the Times, and found that he was staring at a story about himself, he shuddered slightly, and set the paper aside. There had been a time, of course, when seeing his name in the Times —particularly accompanied, as it was that morning, by the words wealthy industrialist —had given him a certain thrill. After all, he had not always been wealthy, and he had not always borne the title industrialist. Once upon a time—very long ago, but still alive in his memory—he had been quite poor, and had been called, by the boys with whom he’d daily roamed the streets of London, in search of mischief and often worse, Dead Eye. Not, of course, because he had one, but because he was one, having taken out a rat at the age of five with a slingshot and a pebble, at a distance of fifty paces.
    He had seldom, since that illustrious day, looked back, and he didn’t care to do so now. But nor did he care, necessarily, to dwell upon his current successes. After all, many of those who fawned over him today had been the selfsame people who’d vilified him a few years back. He was, he knew, neither the genius they thought him now, nor the failure they’d considered him then. The truth, Braden had decided long ago, was somewhere in the middle, and it was best simply not to dwell upon it.
    Accordingly, he gathered up the correspondence his secretary had laid upon his desk and began to read it.
    A knock upon the door to his private offices interrupted him before he’d finished a single line. He looked up and said, tolerantly, “Come in.”
    Ronnie “Weasel” Ambrose, a copy of the same newspaper Braden had been looking at a few moments before tucked beneath his arm, slipped into the room and closed the door behind him in the manner of someone who was attempting to appear as inconspicuous as possible to whomever was standing in the other room.
    “Sorry for the’trusion, Dead,” he said, as soon as the latch was safely secured. “But she’s here.”
    Braden didn’t need to ask who she might be. He said only, in tones of some surprise, “It’s quite early for her, surely. Only just past ten.”
    “She’s got her feathers on,” Weasel said, sauntering across the room and collapsing heavily into one of the leather seats across from his employer’s massive desk. “You know, the ones she wears to shop in.”
    “Ah,” Braden said. “That explains it.”
    “Right.” Weasel took the paper from his arm and said, casually, “You see the paper today, then, Dead?”
    Braden replied, in his deep voice, “I did.”
    “Did you?” Weasel turned the paper round so that the section which featured his employer faced the man himself. “See this part, here?”
    “Indeed,” Braden said. “I did.”
    “Calls it ‘elegant.’” Weasel turned the paper to face himself again, and read aloud, not very fluently, but in a