She had just admitted in response to a question Vanessa had asked that there was no one special among the gentlemen of her acquaintance.

“Do you want someone special in your life?” Vanessa asked with perhaps a thread of exasperation in her voice.

“Of course I do,” Katherine admitted with something of a sigh. “But that is it you see, Nessie. He must be special. I am coming to the conclusion that there is no such person, that I am looking for a mirage, an impossibility.”

Though she knew romantic love in itself was not an impossibility. She had only to consider her sister’s case. Vanessa had been deeply in love with Hedley Dew, her first husband, and Katherine strongly suspected that she loved Lord Lyngate just as much.

“Or perhaps,” she admitted, “there is such a person but I just cannot recognize him. Perhaps the fault is in me. Perhaps I was just not made for soaring passion or tender romance or-”

Vanessa patted her reassuringly on the arm and laughed.

“Of course there is such a man,” she said, “and of course you will recognize him when you find him and feel all the things you dream of feeling. Or after you have found him, perhaps, as I did with Elliott. We were married before I knew how much I loved him-or that I loved him at all, in fact. Indeed, I have still only just admitted it to myself, and I am not at all sure it would not alarm him dreadfully to know it, poor man.”

“Oh, dear,” Katherine said. “This does not sound at all encouraging, Nessie. Though I am sure Lord Lyngate would not be alarmed.”

They looked at each other sidelong and both chuckled.

But perhaps the fault really was in herself, Katherine thought in the coming days and weeks. Perhaps she had too rigid a notion of what the man of her dreams would look like or behave like. Perhaps she was just looking for love in the wrong places. In all the safe places.