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ahead, his jaw halfway to the ground.
    He was not alone. The other occupants of his carriage—parents, a sister, and a brother—wore similar expressions of frozen astonishment. Around them, other people in other carriages also stopped what they were doing to stare in the same general direction.
    Millie turned around and beheld the most beautiful woman on God’s green earth. A mythological creature, surely, Helen of Troy reincarnated or Aphrodite herself, down from Mount Olympus to rendezvous with her Adonis.
    She probably did not walk, but glided over the ground. Her cream lace parasol shielded a face that was at once flawless in its symmetry and unsettling in some indescribable way that separated the beautiful from the merely pretty. Millie could swear that the clouds, which had shielded the crowd from the sun for the past half hour, allowed one brilliant ray to fall on the woman, to illuminate her singular beauty, because it would have been a discourtesy for such loveliness to not also be perfectly lit.
    Impossibly enough, she approached the Graves carriage.
    “Miss Graves, is it not?” she asked, smiling.
    Her smile was so stunning that Millie nearly tumbled backward. She had to fish around for her voice. And was she Miss Graves?
    “Ah…yes?”
    “I know it is rude to introduce oneself, but seeing as we are going to be family soon, I hoped you wouldn’t mind terribly.”
    Millie had no idea what the stranger was talking about. In fact, she barely heard any words, her attention entirely taken by the movements of the woman’s lips. But she was sure of one thing: No matter what the woman wanted, no one would ever, ever mind.
    “No, no, of course not.”
    “I am Mrs. Townsend. And this lovely young lady is my sister, Miss Fitzhugh.”
    Until Mrs. Townsend introduced her companion, Millie hadn’t even noticed that there was anyone with her. Indeed there was, a tall, slender redhead who was quite pretty in her own right.
    “Very pleased to meet you both, I’m sure,” said Millie, still agog at Mrs. Townsend’s beauty.
    “You are engaged to marry my twin,” said Miss Fitzhugh, who had noticed that Millie had lost all powers of reasoning.
    “Oh, of course.”
    He had sisters. Millie knew that. And now that she’d been jolted out of her daze, she even remembered that the sisters had been abroad, Miss Fitzhugh at school in Switzerland, and the incomparable Mrs. Townsend in the Himalayas, on safari with her husband.
    “Mr. Townsend and I started back as soon as we learned of the previous earl’s passing. We traveled as fast as wecould, but we crossed the channel only yesterday,” explained Mrs. Townsend, “after retrieving Miss Fitzhugh from Geneva.”
    At first Millie had thought Mrs. Townsend as ageless as a goddess, but the latter was actually quite young, barely over the cusp of twenty.
    “And I am glad we hurried,” continued Mrs. Townsend. “It was not until we landed that we learned the date of the wedding had already been set.”
    Mr. Graves, not wanting to lose another potential son-in-law to the vagaries of fortune, had demanded that the wedding take place as soon as the financial agreements had been reached. But Lord Fitzhugh refused absolutely: He would not marry while he was still at school. The ceremony had therefore been scheduled the day after the end of summer term, a little more than two weeks away.
    “Our brother is a very fine young man—the finest there is,” Mrs. Townsend went on. “But he
is
a man and as such can be relied upon to know nothing of what needs to be done in case of an engagement and a wedding. Besides, he can’t orchestrate anything from Eton. But now that I am back, we shall proceed apace, beginning with a garden party to introduce you to our friends, a dinner to celebrate the engagement, and of course, when you have returned from your honeymoon, a ball in your honor—a country ball, that is, since London will have emptied by then.”
    Millie had thought herself