"I've looked everywhere." Marie-Anne Pellicot, her long oval face visibly beautiful despite a domino mask of exactly the wrong shade of gray-green for her pale creme-cafe complexion, hurried up, vexation replacing her earlier tears. "It's nearly eleven! She promised to dress our hair..."

Her sister was right behind her. January heard Ayasha's voice in his mind: A designer who knows what she's doing can guide beauty to a woman's form or make that selfiame woman ugly, just in the way she cuts a sleeve. He knew what his wife would have guessed-and said- about Angelique, just from looking at those two dresses, on those two particular girls.

For all her tartness, Ayasha had been a kind woman. She'd never have let Angelique anywhere near those poor children's hair.

"If the parlor is the first place you looked, look again," advised January. The music had soothed away his anger, and he was able to look dispassionately at Angelique and at the situation, only wondering what he was going to say to Mme. Trepagier to keep her from undertaking some other mad attempt to see the woman. He hadn't liked the hard desperation in her eyes as she had said, "I must see her. I MUST." She and Galen may have gone somewhere else for their quarrel, but if she's going to repair those wings she'll have to go back where there's light."

"Galen?" Marie-Anne looked surprised. "Galen left after what she said to him in the lobby. "Which was

horrible, I thought-he can't help it if he stammers."

"Galen." January sighed. "He came back."

"Tiens!" Dominique flung up her hands. "Just what we need! That... that..."

"Wasn't that you who slammed the door?" asked Marie-Rose, trying vainly to tug the lower edge of her bodice into a more flattering position on her hip.