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Girard was telling me only last week that her seamstresses can make up even the fanciest of ball gowns in three hours when necessary.”
    It seemed that it was, after all, possible to make a dress suitable for a bride before the next day. As for all the rest of the garments, they were to be delivered to Grosvenor Square, some within a week, some within two.
    There followed two hours of bewilderment for Abigail. Fabrics and designs were chosen by his lordship and Madame just as if she were a wax figure with no voice or mind of her own.
    In a meeting with Laura that morning for the planning of strategy, it had been agreed, much against Abigail’s conscience, that she keep to her demure image at least until after the wedding—if there was a wedding. At the time, Abigail had been more convinced than ever that she would never set eyes on the Earl of Severn again. But now that the situation was real, it would have been difficult to keep to the plan if she had not been feeling so far beyond her depth.
    Finally she was whisked to a back room—where the earl did not follow her, she was relieved to find—separated from all her clothes, except her chemise and stockings, stood up on a stool, and twirled and prodded and poked and measured for what seemed like a day and a half without stop.
    She clung doggedly to her demure self, slipping only twice. She did protest to Madame once, when she was turned without being asked to do so, that she was no slab of beef and would appreciate not being treated like one. And she did remind a thin, bespectacled seamstress that she was not a pincushion and did not enjoy being punctured by pins. But she felt sorry for the latter lapse immediately after, when the girl looked up at her with anxious eyes and glanced swiftly across to Madame, who fortunately had not heard.
    “Actually,” Abigail said, “I moved when I should have stayed still. It was my fault. Is my arm raised high enough?”
    The girl smiled quickly at her and resumed her work.
    Abigail had hoped for a couple of muslins and a riding habit. Laura had hoped that a ball gown might be added to that list. In all the wild dreamings of a largely sleepless night Abigail had not expected the dizzying number and variety of garments that were judged to be the very barest of necessities for a countess. It would take her a month to wear all the garments she was to be sent, she decided, if she did nothing all day long but change clothes.
    Ten ball gowns. Ten! Were there to be that many balls to attend? And would not one garment suffice for them all, or at the most two? It seemed not.
    She was beginning to feel very much like Cinderella, except that Cinderella had had only one new ball gown. Certainly she had her own Prince Charming awaiting her somewhere on the premises. She had succeeded in persuading herself during the night that he could not possibly be as handsome as she remembered. It was just that she had seen a tolerably well-looking man and reacted like a besotted schoolgirl, she had told herself. But she had not been mistaken. Not at all. He looked quite, quite magnificent wearing a tall beaver hat and carrying a gold-tipped cane.
    And she was beginning to believe in her own good fortune. Though common sense told her that she was foolish in the extreme to have agreed to spend the rest of her life as the possession of a total stranger, even if there was a vague tie of blood between them, common sense had a number of rivals. There were his eyes for one thing. But far more important than that was the knowledge that however unhappy she might prove to be, she would at least always be secure. She would never be poor again. And she would be able to reunite her family.
    It was true that her conscience smote her. For apart from the fact that she was not as she had appeared to be the morning before or as she appeared to be today either, there were other facts that she should tell him, facts that even Laura did not know about. She was not respectable,