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ladies still reside at Penwith, though of course even one of those ladies bears a title.” He bowed his head to Lady Hayes. “And the other will do so within the next few months.” He smiled at Moira. “What an extraordinary coincidence it is that has brought both of us into Cornwall at the same time. I will call today, this afternoon. Miss Hayes, will you do me the honor of accompanying me?”
    Moira had been accepting his plans with resignation, even with some approval. Doubtless it would be best if there were some civility between the two men, who would, after all, be quite close neighbors. But she took instant alarm at the suggestion that she be personally involved in that civility. She looked at her mother, who was sitting straight backed and unsmiling on her chair.
    “We do not visit at Dunbarton, sir,” Moira said. “There have never been any social dealings between our two families.”
    “Indeed, Miss Hayes?” Sir Edwin said. “You amaze me. Is his lordship quite so high in the instep, then? One does not expect it of the aristocracy, especially when one is oneself of superior rank, but it is perhaps understandable. I shall demonstrate my worthiness to be an acquaintance of the Earl of Haverford. I shall apprise him of the fact that my mother was a Grafton of Hugglesbury. The Graftons, as you surely are aware, have the purest of bloodlines, ma’am,” he assured Lady Hayes, “and can trace themselves back to a brave knight who fought at the elbow of William the Conqueror himself.”
    “There was an unfortunate incident several generations back,” Moira explained. “My great-grandfather and the present earl’s great-grandfather were both involved in smuggling, which flourished on the coast here at that time.”
    “Dear me,” Sir Edwin said, looking genuinely shocked. Moira wondered with an unexpected flash of amusement if he had never sipped wine that had come into the country via the back door, so to speak, without the customary duty having been paid on it. She wondered if his mother and his sisters had never drunk tea that had arrived in their teapot by similar shady and circuitous routes. But even if they had, and even if he knew it, he doubtless would not consider that he had been involved in any way with smuggling. Most people did not.
    “The Earl of Haverford acted more in the way of a sponsor and purchaser of smuggled goods than in an active capacity,” Moira continued, “while my ancestor was the leader of the smugglers. He went out at night with his face blackened, I daresay, and a pistol in his belt—and a cutlass between his teeth.” She avoided her mother’s reproachful glance.
    “I had not realized that there was such a blemish on the Hayes’s baronetcy,” Sir Edwin said, clearly distressed. “Smugglers? Pistols and cutlasses? I beg you never to disclose these facts to my mother, Miss Hayes. They would send her into a decline and perhaps even bring on fatal heart palpitations.”
    “When the coast guard caught my great-grandfather,” Moira said, “and dragged him before the nearest magistrate—the Earl of Haverford—the earl sentenced him to seven years in transportation. He was carried off to the hulks.”
    Sir Edwin sighed with noticeable relief. “It is bad, but it might have been worse,” he said. “If you had had a hanging in your family past, Miss Hayes . . .” He shuddered.
    Moira felt unaccountably amused—and vindicated. Sir Edwin had made no reference to the dreadful hypocrisy of the Earl of Haverford. “He returned after the seven years,” Moira said, “doubtless coarsened and hardened by his experiences. He lived for twenty more years as a visible embarrassment to his neighbor. There has been an estrangement between the two families ever since.” Almost but not quite total. It would have been better if it had remained total.
    “It is ever the way,” Sir Edwin said, “for wrongdoers to resent those who in all justice reprove and chastise them. It