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housekeeper glacially. Even in the face of an emergency, the butler was not about to forget his long-standing feud with his rival for power in the household. Mrs. Mullins harrumphed. Davis looked at the footman, who stood hesitating behind the housemaids, with triumph. “Go along with you, Henricks, and fetch his lordship.”
    “Yes, Mr. Davis.” Henricks nodded and departed. The maids, reassured by the housebreaker’s continued prostration, formed a small circle around him.
    “Miss Anna, did he—scare you?” Polly asked in a thrilled whisper.
    Anna, knowing very well what the maid longed to hear, managed to shake her head. She still felt very odd, almost boneless, and she had to clamp her teeth tightly together to keep them from chattering. Even sprawled unconscious on the floor, the intruder looked huge, muscular, and unnervingly tough. Impossible to believe that she had emerged the victor in their battle. Impossible to believe that that firm mouth had taken hers, or that long-fingered hand caressed her breast.
    “Oh, well, that’s a blessing,” said Polly, clearly disappointed. At that moment the intruder stirred again, lifting his head from the floor and shaking it, then getting his arms beneath him as he tried to rise. Anna gasped and scooted back. The maids jumped.
    “Oh, no you don’t!” shouted Davis, and to the accompaniment of a cacophony of shrieks and shouts, he clouted the man over the head with the poker. The resulting thump made Anna wince. The housebreaker immediately collapsed again.
    “We’ll have to tie him up,” Davis said, looking around him as though hoping a rope would miraculously appear.
    “Why don’t you just sit on ’im, Mr. Davis? That’d ’old an army down, it would!”
    Mrs. Mullins’s suggestion, referring as it did to Davis’s substantial girth, was maliciously meant, but the other servants seized on it.
    “Aye, Mr. Davis, you sit on ’im. We’ll all sit on ’im! That’ll hold ’im right and tight for the master!”
    Anna felt her composure, and with it her sense of humor, start to return as that suggestion was carried out. Davis, poker held stiffly in front of his chest, straddled the housebreaker’s back while Beedle sat on his shoulders, brandishing the axe. Polly and Sadie perched on his legs, and Mrs. Mullins, muttering, hovered over all. An elephant would have had a hard time moving under that combined weight.
    “Don’t you be afeared, Miss Anna, we’ve got him fast,” Beedle assured her, seeing the way her eyes fixed on their prisoner.
    “I’m not afraid,” Anna answered in a voice that was rapidly growing stronger. Her mind was beginning to function normally as well. In a very few minutes Graham would appear. The confrontation she had been dreading since the previous night was at hand—although perhaps he would be too caught up in the drama to worry about her. In any case, if she were to carry out her plan, she must get up to the library at once.…
    And then she would sleep the rest of the night with Chelsea. Even if she must give in to Graham eventually, it would not be this night.
    “I—I’m going up to bed,” Anna said, forcing her still jellylike knees to stiffen so that she could stand.
    “But, Miss Anna, won’t you be wishful of telling ’is lordship what ’appened? After all, ’twas you who captured ’im!”
    “O’ course she wants to go ter bed, ox-brain! Miss Anna’s a lady, she is, and she’s ’ad quite a shock! She can talk to ’is lordship in the mornin’!”
    This exchange between Beedle and Mrs. Mullins left the footman looking mulish. Davis clenched the matter with a silencing glare at his fellow servants.
    “You go along now, Miss Anna. I’ll tell his lordship what’s needful, and then you can tell him the rest in your own good time.”
    Anna, with a wan smile at the butler and a last, quick glance at the motionless housebreaker, picked up the overlong skirts of the cloak and started to hurry from the room. The