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start back for home before their guest got too alarmed by Doireann. He rose, nodded to the landlord, and stalked back out into the March wind.
    Mother hadn’t given him many hints about who this girl was, only that it was important for him to make a good impression onher and, if possible, to pique her interest. It was a far cry from her usual admonishments whenever he took an interest in a pretty girl.
    “You must save yourself for someone worthy of you,” she would whisper fiercely to him if he danced more than once with the same girl at a ball. Hmmm. Could this girl have something to do with the duke? A court connection, perhaps? Someone who might be used to introduce him to his true father?
    He bloody well hoped so, before he did something desperate.
    “There ye are, sir.”
    Niall was brought up short. Back already. Padraic the coachman was loitering on the pavement outside the house, communing with his horses still hitched to the carriage. He touched his cap respectfully as he spoke to Niall. “Her ladyship’s opened the curtains o’ the drawin’ room. That means she’ll be wantin’ you in there whenever you’re ready, sir. She told me to tell you as much.”
    “Thank you, Padraic,” Niall replied, and turned toward the front steps. Mother hadn’t said whether this girl was pretty or not. He hoped she was. It would help him sound at least nominally sincere when he did his best, on Mother’s orders, to beguile Miss Penelope Leland.
    Pen sat stiffly in her chair in Lady Keating’s green and gold drawing room. It wasn’t easy paying calls on her own. Last year she and Persy had always made formal calls with Mama, and if it was sometimes difficult not to be swamped in her formidable wake, it was also possible to let Mama do all the talking and fade into the wallpaper if she felt like it.
    But she couldn’t get away with that today. As the only guest, she was the focus of two pairs of very green eyes as she sippedLady Keating’s black china tea from a delicate porcelain cup and answered questions about her London season.
    At least Lady Keating was being entirely charming today, so much so that Pen had begun to wonder if she had imagined her initial coldness yesterday afternoon. Lady Keating had greeted her with a kiss when she arrived and slipped an arm about her waist to guide her into the drawing room.
    “You will have to excuse Niall. I told him to be on time, but he’s late, the rogue,” she laughed after presenting Doireann. “If there’s not any tea left for him by the time he returns, he’ll have to go without.”
    “I rather doubt that,” Doireann murmured, gazing at nothing in particular. “Niall is not accustomed to stinting his appetites.”
    Goodness! What a thing to say about one’s own brother!
Pen murmured something noncommittal and saw Lady Keating shoot her daughter a dark look.
    After twenty minutes of conversation, Pen still hadn’t been able to figure Doireann Keating out. She was a shorter, more fey version of her mother, with her green eyes and dark hair, but lacked Lady Keating’s self-assurance. And though Doireann’s manner was pleasant, if reserved, Pen could sense something underlying her civility. She reminded Pen of the lions in the Zoological Gardens in London, placidly dozing in the sun but always with one eye cracked open, waiting.
    “And your twin sister was married at the end of her first season?” Doireann was saying now. “How very efficient of her.”
    Pen couldn’t help laughing, though Doireann’s word choice was ever-so-slightly barbed. “Believe me, it wasn’t her plan at all. She would rather have stayed home with her books and studies. I was far more eager than she to go to London.”
    “Her husband-to-be must have been very persuasive, then.” Lady Keating smiled.
    “No, not particularly. He was nearly as shy as she was. I spent weeks trying to convince him to talk to her.” Pen smiled too, but a little sigh escaped her.
    Lady Keating leaned