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anything.” Struck by a sudden thought, she added: “Have you two …? I mean …” Lily failed, for once, to summon up words acceptable enough to disguise her intrusive question. “Er … plighted your troth?” she finished with an awkward attempt at humour.
    “Troth well and truly plighted, I’m glad to say,” Joe replied comfortably, picking up and running with the euphemism. “Though Dorcas would fail to recognise the phrase—she’s a very modern young lady. She’s not your average English Miss, Lily. Something of a free-thinker. In fact, ‘bohemian’ is probably the kindest word that comes to mind to describe her style.”
    “Then I can’t see what’s holding you up.”
    “The problem’s not with me. It’s difficult. She’s quite the academic, you know. She won’t let me use the word ‘bluestocking’ but that’s what she is these days. She was a late starter on the degree business but took to learning like a duck to water. Most girls her age are either married or snatching desperately at the few good men left standing, but Dorcas doesn’t seem to care much about domesticity. She speaks scathingly about friends she’s made at the university, girls with good brains who work away for three years and then give it all up because they’ve met and got engaged to another undergraduate with wonderful prospects, or none. Dorcas has made it plain that’s not for her. She’s planning a few more years of research into her subject. And this is where the problems arise. Now—if she were fiddling about writing a thesis on, oh, the disputed authorship of Titus Andronicus , I’d tell her to put her pen down and let it remain a mystery, but it’s not ivory tower stuff she’s involved with. It’s scientific enquiry which could benefit mankind, she tells me. It’s difficult to set one’s unworthy self up against the Good of Mankind.”
    Lily sighed. “Oh, dear! I can understand why you haven’t fallen to your knees yet then. Might as well ask Marie Curie to stop stirring that filthy pitchblend and go and put the cabbage soup on. Poor Joe. Poor Dorcas. There’s no entirely happy solution. I didn’t find it.” More hesitantly, she added, “Though I think you ought at least to put a proposal before her. Perhaps she’s just waiting for you to come out with it? You know—putting on a showof couldn’t-care-less independence in case the offer’s not forthcoming. That was my situation exactly with Bacchus.”
    Joe grinned. “Was I the last one to twig that you were conducting an illicit affair for two years with my top Branchman right under my nose?”
    “Yes. And the only one to object to him making an honest woman of me. ‘Over my dead body,’ I remember you said.”
    “No—over Bacchus ’s dead body—you misremember! Reducing my two best agents to one at the peal of a church bell was never going to please me .”
    “It wasn’t easy. We knew we loved each other but he knew I loved my job just as much. That’s why he held off asking me to marry him. James is a thug—I can’t say you didn’t warn me. He’ll beat a man senseless, put a bullet through him if he has to, but he’s not entirely insensitive. He could see I was having a ripping time and thought I might choose to stick with the police force and reject him—choose danger over domesticity. Because that would have been his own choice if he’d had to make one. His own masculine choice. He couldn’t grasp that I might be willing to give up all this”—she rolled her eyes with humour around his office—“for a lifetime of cooking and cleaning. But I loved him,” she finished as though that were explanation enough.
    “How did he get around to … er …?”
    “He never did ask me. Oh, he intended to! He took me out for a romantic dinner at the Savoy and all the signs were there that he was working up to saying something important. But he dropped me off on my doorstep at the end of the evening with not a word spoken. He