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head.”
    â€œReally, Auntie? That’s devilish int’r’sting, you know. Never heard of such a thing before in all these years I’ve known you. . . . Your servant, ladies!” He put on his hat and cantered away. Jennie tried to read Aunt Higham’s face and saw recognition replacing alarm, but so cannily that Lady Clarke could not suspect.
    â€œIt was always cats with me,” she said comfortably. “I loved them, but oh, dear, what wicked colds they gave me.”
    Charlotte floated home through the first of those iridescent dreams from which all Gothic lovers would henceforth be forever exiled. Jennie retired to her room in a confusion of heat and chills, attacked by powerful physical sensations of desire and longing such as she had never known before. They couldn’t be reasoned away by the argument that the superb creature on horseback was probably no more than that marzipan soldier.
    She saw the girl of the morning, wrapped in the old robe and wearing the shapeless fleece-lined slippers, counting her gold sovereigns and aching to be gone, determined to be gone. She stared at this girl as one might stare at a specter, not frightened but incredulous. There was a slow tightening around her temples, and she put her hands to them to loosen the invisible band.
    How could it be ? How could she have become something utterly different in the space of a few hours, most of them extremely uncomfortable, from the creature who for six months had been one huge throb of longing for home?
    Free of her clothes, she sponge-bathed in cool water and, shivering, told herself she had merely been charmed by the display, as she had been charmed by so much in London. But she knew she was lying.
    It wasn’t the blue coat and the boots, the mastery of the animal, the bared blond head against the spring sky. It was the way he had looked straight at her, as if he had seen Jennie Hawthorne—her own Jennie Hawthorne—beneath the straw brim and the silk lilacs. Not just any miss being shown in the auction ring, but Jennie Hawthorne of Pippin Grange, Northumberland, England, the World, the Universe.
    He saw her and knew her.
    She was at once despairing and exhilarated. She dressed for the evening as if he were to be there, though she knew he would not be. Charlotte looked feverish and was sent to bed early. Jennie thought wryly that if anyone should be sent to bed with the megrims, it was herself. She recognized her chaos, ridiculed it, and was powerless against it.
    George Vinton came in that evening, along with other guests; Uncle Higham and his particular friends played whist in the library, and in the drawing room Jennie played backgammon with George. He must have been surprised by her gaiety, though she’d always been good-natured with George. Tonight she was like someone who was slightly drunk and immensely entertained by the fact, while recognizing the underlying desperation. Could she bear it if she never saw Captain Gilchrist again?
    George’s large, round, wondering dark eyes reminded her of Nelson’s, except that with Nelson that expression sometimes meant that he was about to bite. There was no such doubt with George. He would always be predictable. Aunt Higham could run on about his prospects, but not even money from his mother, mixing with cathedral society, and having an uncle who called the Archbishop of Canterbury by his first name, were going to make him anything more than what he was. But surely there was someone waiting to love George Vinton and to make his rectory a happy one. Jennie felt very tender toward George tonight.
    Passing among the game tables, Aunt Higham patted her shoulder, an unusual caress. She had been absentminded since they’d come home, but alone with Jenny for a moment just before the first callers came, she had suddenly said, “We didn’t fit you for a riding habit. It didn’t occur to me because your uncle doesn’t think riding