"You're very quiet, Eversleigh," Lord Horton commented, turning everyone's attention to the man who was lounging elegantly against the mantel. He was a tall man, dressed all in black, with the exception of his white shirt points, which were not as high as those of the dandified Darnley, and the white neckcloth, which was not as intricately tied as that of Rufus Smythe. Beneath dark hair, brushed forward in a fashionable Brutus style, his face was thin and sharply drawn. He had a strong jawline, lips that were habitually drawn into a thin line, a straight nose, and blue eyes that were usually partly hidden behind half-closed eyelids. His whole stance suggested a lazy boredom. Only a close observer would have noticed that the broad shoulders, slim waist, and muscled calves owed nothing to a tailor's tricks-corsets and padding and such. A close observer might also have noticed that the eyes behind the lazy lids were unusually keen.

"Well, what do you say, Eversleigh?" Horton prompted. "Are you in this to the bitter end? Are you prepared to die a bachelor in your eighty-fifth year or thereabouts?" He grinned.

Marius Devron, Duke of Eversleigh, lifted a quizzing glass, his only ornament, to his eye without hurry and surveyed his friend's grinning face.

"Well, it's like this, Horton," he said at last. "We were young puppies, were we not, and assumed that the realities of life need never catch up to us. A foolish notion, of course." He lowered the quizzing glass and glanced cynically at the almost-unconscious figure of Hanley.

"The realities of life?" Sir Wilfred prompted.

"The need for alliances and such." Eversleigh waved a languid hand in the air, his elbow still resting on the mantel.

"It's all very well for you to talk so scathingly," Smythe complained. "You have no need to marry money, Marius. You're as rich as Croesus. And you don't need to marry position. You can't get much higher than duke. You really do not need to marry at all. You can keep the club going single-handed when the rest of us have been forced to bowout. And you have the delectable Mrs. Broughton as, er, companion."