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significant paper dealing with the names of the Egyptian pharaohs. Technically speaking, the decipherment of hieroglyphs was Daphne Carsington’s specialty. Everyone knew this.
    Everyone knew she was a genius. The trouble was, she was a woman. A male had to represent her, or her discoveries and theories would be mercilessly attacked and mocked by the large and noisy element who feared and hated women who had any intelligence, let alone more than they.
    Her brother, who most usually represented her, was abroad. Her husband, Rupert Carsington, though not nearly as stupid as everyone believed him to be, would never be able to read a scholarly paper with a straight face—if, that is, he didn’t fall asleep while reading it.
    Since Lisle and Daphne had collaborated for years, and since he had the highest regard for her abilities, he was more than happy to stand in her place and present her latest paper with the seriousness it deserved.
    But one person in the audience thought the whole thing a great joke.
    Lord Belder sat in the front row next to Olivia, and he was mocking every word Lisle uttered.
    If he was trying to impress Olivia with that technique, he was barking up the wrong tree.
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    More likely, though, Belder merely wanted to provoke Lisle. He’d made sure to be in the way yesterday, when Lisle had called on her. But half the world was at her parents’ house, and Lisle hadn’t a chance to exchange more than a few words with her. He’d told her about the paper he was presenting, and she’d said she would attend, and Belder had said he’d escort her: He wouldn’t dream of missing Lord Lisle’s “little lecture,” he said.
    Lisle’s temper was easily ignited at the best of times. At present he was seething on Daphne’s account: Belder was mocking her hard work. Still, the idiot wouldn’t be let to continue for much longer, Lisle told himself. Belder wasn’t at Almack’s or a ball, and the present audience had little patience with this sort of behavior.
    Sure enough, Lisle had scarcely thought it when one of the scholars spoke up. “Sir,” the gentleman said coldly, “perhaps you would be good enough to reserve your wit for a more suitable milieu: I suggest your club—or a coffee house or tavern. We came to hear the gentleman at the lectern, not you.”
    Lisle pretended to brush a speck of dust from his notes. Without looking up, he said,
    “Wit? Was that what it was? I beg your pardon, Lord Belder, for not responding to your remarks. I mistook you for a saint.”
    “A saint?” said Belder with a laugh—for Olivia’s benefit, no doubt, to show how little he cared about being reprimanded publicly like a boorish schoolboy.
    “Certainly,” Lisle said. “In Egypt, you see, those of slow understanding or no understanding are called saints, and their peculiarities of appearance, speech, and behavior are regarded as signs of divine blessing.”
    The audience roared. The scholars took a moment to exact their revenge, making Belder the butt of their jokes. He obliged them by turning redder than Olivia’s hair.
    Having administered the setdown Belder had been begging for, Lisle delivered the rest of Daphne’s paper in peace.
    When he’d finished answering questions and the audience began to disperse, he broke through the wall of men surrounding Olivia—dim-witted fowl clustered about a dozing crocodile, as he saw it—and offered to take her home. Turning away from Belder, she bestowed a smile on Lisle so dazzling that he couldn’t see straight for a moment. Then she took his arm. They walked to her carriage, her maid, Bailey, trailing after them.
    The footman had put down the step and Olivia was moving toward it when a boy flew along the pavement straight at them. He was running at top speed, dodging the groups of scholarly gentlemen arguing about pharaohs as they walked along the Strand.
    He dodged Lisle as well,