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"So in her eyes Of course, she couldn’t be seen with someone like himself "I say that only because Rafe is quite nervous about ain "I would not want you to think that I did not wish to go"

"Why don’t we go in disguise?" He heard hi And her face lit up

"What fun that would be! Perhaps we could go to a rather out-of-the-way spot" Her eyes were glowing, clearly picturing all kinds of debauched environ

Gabe suddenly remembered that he’d seen a broadside nailed to a tree in Silchester "There’s a singer fro at the Black Swan"

"This would be wonderful!" she whispered, lookingwo up an illicit liaison

He bowed "In that case, to, with exquisite hints of laughter deep in thee that towith her--would be the kind of pleasure that a man is lucky to have once in his life

She disappeared into her bedchaown and climb into bed in a swish of delicate silk

And Gabe stayed there in the chilly hallway, staring at the two doors It was like the old ood and evil Except as life always is, the doors were so much more complicated than that

Gillian Pythian-Adams was coolly uninterested in him Perhaps in all men, but certainly in him And yet she had that old-fashioned quality, decency, that his very soul yearned for

Ien Maitland was a woman so beautiful that a smile from her, laced with desire, was as potent as sin itself She was not indecent, nor yet sinful She was… just Ien, and she wanted hiood for a liaison Never for e

Chapter 17

A Mustache and a West Wind

Rafe was not sleeping It was such a new experience for hiht and yet not inebriated, that he was bent on exploring it He found hi out of his o, for all the world like a second houserooht wind His old nurse used to say that a night wind froht sently to the courtyard, blown inside out by the wind They littered the ground, darker splotches on the soft gray of the cobblestones Those cobblestones, Rafe thought, have been here since the 1300s My ancestors walked those very stones

It should have been a profoundly e the proper ereat-uncle Woodward, who used to prance about in puh red heels, his hair powdered and his face carefully painted He had been a quintessential Georgian rake, according to servants’ gossip when Rafe was growing up

It h heels, Rafe thought idly

Just then there was a sound at his door, and he turned

"Gabe!" And: "I’d offer you a drink, but water is so tedious" For some reason his brother looked as burnt to the socket as Rafe used to feel after a fourth brandy "Is Mary all right?"

"She was crying again," Gabe said, throwing hi you, but I saw the light under your door"

"Isn’t crying nor is that they are irksome at their best and pestilent at their worst"

"That has a faintly poetic quality"

"Trying to i that I’d paid more attention to books Perhaps the two of us could discuss philosophy if I’d had"

"I’d rather discuss woainst the chair