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necessary for our girls. But I can see that it may be. We will see Mrs. Meacham tomorrow about yours.”
    George won the second game in a row and laughed like a conqueror. Euphoric with victory, he said, “I say, Miss Hawthorne, how about a turn in the garden? The moon’s coming up. Let me get your shawl.”
    At dawn she had hoped to be riding north by moonrise. How long ago had she heard the blackbird and the baker’s boy and thought: If I can get George Vinton alone —
    â€œWhat I’d like better than that, Mr. Vinton, is to hear you sing.”
    Flattery assuaged his disappointment. “If you’ll play for me.”
    â€œOf course!”
    There was a pleasant stir of anticipation through the drawing room as they went to the pianoforte, where candles at either end of the keyboard burned in slender chimneys. In spite of his occasional incoherence of speech and his gobbling laughter, George sang in a sweet lyric tenor, every word exquisitely clear, as if the music allowed a different George to escape on wings of song. Tonight he sang the tender Elizabethan “Song to Celia,” beginning “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” and the poignant “Passing By.”
    Tonight his singing had for Jennie an almost intolerable pathos, as if he meant his songs for her, or for the way he had been willing to love her, as if he were already gazing into the time when she would be in his past.
    She wanted to assure him that she wasn’t worth it, while George’s voice floated in the room like a seagull’s perfect glide to the sea.

    It was a great relief when tea came in.
    Captain Gilchrist called the next afternoon, without his great-aunt. He called on the day after that, and on the evening after that. It became known that Auntie had suddenly felt unwell and had gone to Bath for the waters. Her grandnephew strolled like a tawny lion through the drawing room or, to be more earthy about it, a large golden tomcat in a town of tabbies. His laughter made the teacups rattle and the wineglasses ring. In or out of uniform, he moved in an incandescent aura. George Vinton became invisible, and even Uncle Higham suffered partial eclipse, unthinkable in his own house, but he didn’t seem ill-tempered about it.
    Though the Captain was responsible for Jennie’s recognition of this facet of her passionate nature, she never had the temerity to see him as a husband. Not hers, anyway, if ever anyone’s. He surely had a sweetheart or a mistress who moved in circles the Highams never touched. His period of effulgence at Brunswick Square would soon end like a natural phenomenon when he tired of it.
    In the meantime it was joyful torment to play the piano while he sang Jacobite songs in his virile baritone, or to stand up with him in the impromptu quadrilles and polkas he organized when he discovered that one of Uncle’s whist partners could play for dancing. This was something neither of the Highams had known about the man, but somehow Captain Gilchrist found out and had him at the Broadwood and enjoying it.
    One night the Captain came in full-dress uniform because he had to go on to a ball afterward. “Confounded nuisance, you know, but the Colonel’s giving it for his daughter’s birthday.” Does he intend you for her? Jennie thought with a savage jealousy that shocked her. Then he said, “Let’s have a polka! Where is that genius of the keyboard? Let’s have him away from his infernal whist, what?”
    During the dance he whirled her away from the others, out into the foyer across the marble floor, and she saw them in the glass that hung there, he huge in blue and gold with the red sash around his lean middle, she looking as frail as an early jonquil in her yellow silk muslin. Now that she knew his arm, his scent, the essence of him , there were times when she thought she could not bear it. The longer he amused himself at Brunswick Square, the worse