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and neither was her family. That was the truth of the matter.
    But the temptation to remain quiet until after the wedding was proving to be just too overwhelming.
    So much for her own motives. But what about his? It would be better not to ask, Laura had advised, and Abigail agreed. She would ask him after their wedding, perhaps. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she would not want to know.
    Their business on Bond Street was not by any means over when she was finally dressed and back in the front parlor with his lordship again. There were shoes and fans and reticules and feathers and handkerchiefs and a whole lot of faradiddle to be added to the purchases. But finally she was taken to a confectioner’s
and fed a meat pie and cakes and tea. She felt half-starved.
    “Why?” she could not resist asking when conversation did not flow freely between them.
    “Why?” He raised his eyebrows and fixed her with those blue eyes, which she wished for her own comfort he would direct at some other patron of the shop.
    “Why are you marrying me?” she asked.
    He looked at her assessingly and his expression gradually softened so that he did not look nearly as haughty as he usually did.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “This must all be very bewildering for you. I realize that marriage is far in excess of the kind of help you hoped for when you called on me yesterday.”
    He spoke to her gently, as if he were speaking to a child. He smiled, and Abigail’s eyes strayed to his dimple.
    “I have had my title and everything that comes with it for fifteen months,” he said. “For twelve of those I was in mourning. Now it seems that it is time for me to marry. I am thirty years old and a peer of the realm. I have female relatives about to descend on me. They should be here before the week is out. They would like nothing better than to take the choosing of a bride out of my hands, and yet I feel a strange whim to make my own choice.”
    “And so the hasty marriage,” she said. “You are afraid that they will persuade you to change your mind if we are still unmarried when they arrive?”
    He smiled again. And looking deliberately away from his dimple, she saw that he had attractive creases at the corners of his eyes. He would have wrinkles there when he was a little older. She would have to advise him to rub cream around his eyes at night—not that the wrinkles would look unattractive.
    “Let me just say,” he said, “that I would prefer to present them with a
fait accompli.
”
    “But why me?” she asked, looking meekly down at her plate. This must be the very last question, she decided. She was not supposed to ask any, but to speak only when spoken to. Was it just that she had walked into his house at the right moment? Or the wrong moment, depending on how this marriage would turn out. It certainly was not her beauty or her charm or her dowry.
    “I seem to have been surrounded by and managed by female relatives from boyhood on,” he said with a laugh. “I have a notion that I would like a quiet and sensible and good-natured wife, Miss Gardiner, one who will be a companion rather than a manager. I judge you to have those qualities that I am looking for. Am I wrong?”
    Oh, dear good Lord! Conscience was a dreadful thing.
    Abigail swallowed. And a crumb went plummeting in the wrong direction. Other customers looked around as her napkin came up over her face and she wheezed and gasped and coughed until she thought she would vomit. The Earl of Severn, she realized as she willed herself not to disgrace herself, was standing over her, patting her back.
    “Are you all right, ma’am?” he asked as the coughing began to subside.
    How mortifying. How positively and totally humiliating!If someone would be kind enough to kick a hole in the floor, she would gratefully drop through it.
    “How mortifying!” she said weakly, lowering her napkin, knowing that her face must be scarlet if not purple with embarrassment and the exertions of dislodging