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embroidery stretched out before her.
     
    Mr. Wilton paused, looking at her with eyes like a good-humored dog. Elizabeth inferred it was time to make some reply. “How diverting, sir,” she said.
     
    “I am glad you think so!” Mr. Wilton leaned forward. “That’s nothing compared to what happened to a man I know out in Surrey...”
     
    Elizabeth had a sudden savage wish that she had been born to a family of good breeding but no fortune, so she might be “reduced” to marrying a second or third son, a soldier who would whisk her off to foreign places. To the East Indies, say—or the West Indies, she wasn’t particular. But her thirty thousand pounds restrained her as effectively as a butterfly in a net, and Charles Wilton laid out before her all the details concerning his friend’s recent purchase of a horse.
     
    “And what do you think of that, Miss Elizabeth?”
     
    “Very droll indeed, sir.”
     
    Perhaps when she did enter Society next year—if she got that far, if she could dodge the advances of her mamma’s parade for that long—she might contrive to entangle herself with such a young officer. It could not be very hard to do; she had read of such things in novels. Or to be precise, she had not read them herself. It was one unladylike habit her mother did not need to worry over. Her elder cousin Mirabelle had read them out loud, and Elizabeth and Lily had listened. It had been, Elizabeth thought, preferable to attempting conversation with Mirabelle. Hearing all the novels meant she knew how the story went. A young lady goes to London for her first Season and is swept off her feet by a dashing young man, but he proves faithless or disreputable or both, and sometimes the young lady is ruined. Or sometimes she merely makes an “unfortunate alliance.” Elizabeth thought an unfortunate alliance a perfectly acceptable price to pay for the chance to see something more of the world than the walled-in gardens of fine houses.
     
    “Elizabeth,” her aunt said in a freezing whisper, “Mrs. Wilton asked you a question.”
     
    Elizabeth started. “Oh, I beg your pardon. I...I cannot think what is causing my mind to wander so. It must be the heat, or perhaps I am coming over poorly...”
     
    No one in the room was fooled. Well, Charles Wilton, perhaps; Elizabeth sensed it wouldn’t take much to fool him. But her mother and aunt knew she never took ill, and Mrs. Wilton’s lips pursed as she repeated, “I wondered if you would join your mother and your aunt when they take tea with me on Friday.”
     
    “Thank you, ma’am, I should be most happy to.” Elizabeth attempted to give the impression of enthusiasm, but there was not much that could be done to repair the tatters of the visit. Elizabeth was of two minds on that. She was in many ways relieved to have Mrs. Wilton taking her departure, and if she had shaken off Mr. Wilton’s interest, so much the better. But as she took note of the agitation on her mother’s face and the anger in her aunt’s eyes, she became abruptly uncertain if the victory won over the Wiltons was worth the punishment she was sure to catch once they were gone.
     
    Her aunt waited only until the sound of the closing outer door proclaimed the Wiltons to be out of earshot. “Your manners, Miss Elizabeth Barton, do no credit to your family.”
     
    “I am sorry, ma’am,” Elizabeth replied as evenly as she could. “I am unaccountably distracted today.”
     
    “A fine day you have picked for it,” her mother exclaimed. “Before Mrs. Wilton, of all people! She is a force to be reckoned with in this neighborhood, as you very well know! She pays us the compliment of bringing her nephew to meet you—and he is to inherit, Elizabeth, you know that! You could hardly find any better match! Here close to home, too! But no, you must go and be sulky and probably you have put him off for all time!”
     
    Elizabeth devoutly hoped so. She wished her mother would have done with the