Her hair was almost black, an inheritance from her Italian mother, she assumed, and heavy and straight. It was almost impossible to coax it into any fashionable style. Rosalind usually wore it in a smooth chignon, as she did today. Her eyes were large enough and thickly lashed, her best feature, in fact. But they too were very dark. She wished they were blue, like Sylvia's, or gray at least. There was nothing remotely delicate or feminine about her appearance, she concluded.

But it was pointless, anyway, to wish for delicate eyes and brows, wavy hair, a shorter stature, and a more svelte figure. What good would beauty do her when there would always be the one great defect? Nothing could ever change that. Uncle Lawrence had understood. He had never forced her to socialize. On the few occasions when she had been forced into company, he must have noticed as well as she the reactions of strangers: distaste, embarrassment, pity. He was quite willing to let her stay at home with her books, her painting, and her music, or to ride freely around the estate on her mare, Flossie.

By what right did this Edward Marsh, the new Earl of Raymore, order her to come to his residence in London? She was two and twenty years old and no direct relation of his. She resented her dependence on him. The only complaint she had ever had against Uncle Lawrence had come after his death. She had never understood why she, as well as Sylvia, had been put under the guardianship of his nephew and heir until her marriage. He had known that she would never marry.

“You are very quiet, Ros, and you are not even looking out the window," Sylvia said in exasperation. "Do look. We are about to enter the outskirts of the city. Oh, it is so easy to imagine why people used to expect the streets to be paved with gold, is it not?"

Rosalind obligingly turned her attention to the window, but both girls were soon exclaiming in dismay overthe dirty streets and the ragged, grimy people that crowded them.