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show themselves in.
    Ordinarily, I could care less for such formalities.  But just at that moment, I found myself wishing that Aunt Gardiner employed an elderly, supremely correct butler with a name like Worthington or Snell .
    “My aunt is resting,” I said.  “Is there something I might—”  I had been bouncing Susanna on my hip, but she was still shrieking and angrily stretching out her hands to the wooden toys on the floor.  Loud enough that it was growing hard to hear my own voice. 
    I gave up, stooped, and retrieved the wooden duck and the wooden pig, made the pig pretend to kiss her chubby little cheeks (I had already thoroughly embarrassed myself in front of Mr. Dalton, and decided that I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb) and then handed the animals to her.
    Susanna’s shrieks changed to a gurgle of a laugh.  And then she put the pig into her mouth and started to gnaw on it, an expression of fierce concentration on her chubby face.
    “Is there something I might do for you instead?” I finished.
    Mr. Dalton was watching me.  I could not tell whether it was with disapproval in his gaze or no.  Though I suppose it very likely was.  Perhaps as a clergyman he disapproves on principle of play acting—even with wooden animals?  Or perhaps he was merely chagrined at having to deal with me—the girl he ‘knows by reputation’—instead of my aunt.
    At any rate—just as his study of me was beginning to make me feel thoroughly self-conscious, and thus irritated—he finally cleared his throat and said, “I called to give Mrs. Gardiner the approximate number of gift boxes that will be required for the children’s ward at London Hospital.  I volunteer my time there as chaplain.  And Mrs. Gardiner has very kindly offered to put together some small gifts of food and warm clothes for the children who were obliged to spend the Christmas holidays as hospital patients.”
    I cannot decide which is the more annoying: Mr. Dalton’s disapproval or his continued undermining of my every excuse to be impolite.  I took firm hold on my temper, drew a breath, and said, “That is a very worthy cause, Mr.—”
    And then before I could finish, the parlour door opened again, and Mark Chamberlayne came staggering into the room.
    Have I mentioned Captain Chamberlayne before?  I suppose I have not.  He was a captain in the militia regiment stationed in Meryton two years ago.  And as such, part of all of Lydia’s and my madcap fun and schemes back then.  I suspect those days must seem as distant to him now as they do to me.
    At any rate, he came reeling into the parlour this morning and crashed into a small table, upsetting a vase, a statue of a shepherdess, and a jar of potpourri onto the floor.  And I moved on from a wish that I could teach Rose the meaning of the phrase ‘at home’ to a momentary wish that I could boil her in oil.
    Of course, Mark’s gait is never terribly steady—one of his legs having been replaced by a wooden peg—but in this case, the staggering was a result of his being extremely drunk.
    Not that that was so very great a surprise; he is very nearly always drunk these days.  Yet I cannot bring myself to turn him away when he calls to see me—which is usually at least once a week.  Besides liking Mark for the sake of our old friendship, I always seem to see John at the sight of him—and wonder in what state John would have been if he had come back from Waterloo alive.
    Mark has round brown eyes and a round face and a crest of very fair hair that stands up all over his head—rather like Susanna’s.  Or rather, he used to.  The fair hair is the same, but his eyes are now all but lost in pockets of flesh, and his face has the puffy, ravaged look of one who habitually drinks to excess.
    He stared dazedly down at the wreckage of broken china and potpourri he had caused, shook his head as though trying to clear it—and then he lurched towards me and seized my hand, breathing