But he did not return to his box. He left the theater and walked home, his carriage not having been directed tc return for him until the end of the performance.

So she was coming out of hiding at last. She was going to be at Nora's. Well, then, he would see her there.

Eight years was a long time-or seven and a half to be more accurate. He supposed she would have changed. She

had been eighteen then, fresh from the schoolroom, fresh from the country, shy, sweet, pretty-he never had been able to find the words to describe her as she ahd been then. Words made her sound uninteresting, no different from dozens of other young girls making their come-out. Judith Farrington had been different.

Or to him she had been different.

She would be twenty-six years old now. A woman. A widow. The mother of two young children. And her marriage could not have been a happy one-unless she had not known, of course. But how could a wife not know, even if she spent all of her married life in the country, that her husband lived a life of dissipation and debauchery?

She would be different now. She was bound to be.

He wanted to see the difference. He had waited for it a long time, especially since the death of her husband in a barroom brawl-that was what it had been despite the official story that he had died in a skirmish with thieves.

He had waited. And come to London as soon as he knew that she was there. And waited again for her to begin to appear in public. And finally, it seemed, she was to appear at Nora's soiree.

He would be there too. He had a score to settle with Judith Easton. Revenge to take. He had a great deal of leftover hatred to work out of his heart and his soul.

He had waited a long time for this.

His eyes found her immediately when he entered Lord Clancy's drawing room three evenings later. Indeed, he hardly needed the evidence of his eyes that she was there. There had always been something about her that appealed very strongly to a sixth sense in him.