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not keep her mind on food when life was so full of more interesting experiences. Who cared about something so mundane as breakfast? It was a lovely day— warm and pleasant, with a light wind from the south—and she would be spending it with the only suitor who’d ever truly captured her heart. Tristram Enders. Even the name was lovely. She smiled to herself in joyful anticipation.
    Today, she was certain, would be the day he offered for her.
    As her father watched her abstracted face, trying to read her thoughts, she sat staring with unseeing eyes at the discarded muffin on her plate. For this special day, she was thinking, I must choose my costume carefully. After long and serious consideration, she decided on her new rose-and-gold walking dress; it had a full skirt that would flutter enticingly in the breeze. With her wide-brimmed straw bonnet, yellow slippers and pale yellow gloves, she’d be top-of-the-trees. And she’d carry her ruffled parasol. From beneath it, she would gaze at Tris coquettishly from the corner of her eyes, eyes that many men had told her were spellbinding. Tris would not be able to resist. The circumstances were ideal. He would surely declare himself this afternoon. She could hardly wait.
    Her father, of course, could not read her thoughts. But the cat-in-the-cream look in her green eyes told him as much as he wanted to know. Poor Tris Enders, he thought with a mixture of alarm and amusement, your goose is cooked.
     
     

 
     
    7
     
     
    Later that afternoon, when Cleo returned from that eagerly anticipated ride and strode in, alone, to the drawing room, her red-and-gold skirts swished and her mouth was tight with anger. Her father deduced at once that things had not gone as planned. “Aha,” he chortled, looking up from the chessboard on which he was engaged in playing a game against himself, “so the fellow did not come up to snuff after all, did he?”
    “No, he did not,” Cleo said, handing her parasol to the butler who’d hurried into the room behind her.
    “Good for him. Perhaps he’s not such a bumpkin as I thought.”
    “Of course he’s not a bumpkin,” she said in disgust, dismissing the butler with a wave of her hand and dropping down upon the sofa. “But I can’t imagine what’s tying his tongue.”
    “Good sense, perhaps,” her father ventured mildly.
    She threw him a scornful look but let the quip pass. Instead, she began to review the details of the afternoon in her mind. But she could think of nothing that had gone awry. It was a mystery. She knew the fellow cared for her; she’d had too many admirers in the past not to know the symptoms. But something had kept him from making an offer. Perhaps there was a simple detail... some small thing that had gone askew... that would explain his default. “Is there something wrong with how I look?” she asked, rising and posing for her father. “Is my hat brim too wide? My lash-blacking smudged? My gown too gaudy?”
    “You are perfect,” Lord Smallwood assured her. “Absolutely lovely.”
    “That’s what I thought. Then where can I have gone amiss?”
    “Perhaps you overwhelmed the fellow. He’s just a country bumpkin, after all.”
    “I wish you’d stop calling him that, Papa. He’s as self-confident as any London native. And he was not the least shy during our ride. He joked and teased and was in every way perfectly comfortable with me.”
    “Then I see no reason for you to be in such a taking.” He returned his attention to the chessboard and moved a pawn. “He probably merely decided to make his offer at another time and place,” he added absently.
    Cleo blinked at her father in sudden apprehension. “Yes,” she breathed, “I think you may be right! When he set me down, he did ask if I would be at home tonight. I was tempted to tell the idiot my evenings were engaged for the rest of the month, but...”
    “But—?” her father asked, looking round at her curiously.
    She smiled ruefully. “But