"Good afternoon, my lord," Margaret replied, dropping him a deep curtsy.

Eleven hours later, at two o'clock in the morning to be exact, the Earl of Brampton sat alone in the library of his town house in Grosvenor Square, getting slowly but very effectively drunk. The brandy decanter beside him was all but empty; another stood on the desk, waiting to be tackled. Chalmer, the butler, and Stevens, Brampton's valet, had both been sent to bed and ordered not to disturb him again that night.

"So," he said aloud to his brandy glass, peering through the clear liquid to the dancing flames of the log fire a few feet away, "at the grand age of thirty-three, you are getting leg-shackled, are you, Brampton? You are giving up all the loneliness and cheerlessness of a bachelor home for the bliss of matrimony-and with an antidote like Margaret Wells, self-styled spinster who was unable to snare a husband in more than five Seasons in London, until she gave up the struggle and donned her old maid's cap."

He laughed harshly, reached out with one foot to push a log back into the blaze, and lurched to his feet. A few moments later he gazed with satisfaction at a full glass of brandy and stumbled back to his chair.

"And with this paragon of beauty and feminine grace and charm," he continued, still aloud, "you are proposing to set up your nursery." He shuddered with distaste at the fashionable phrase which always conjured up in his mind unpleasant images of squawking babies and nursemaids.

Brampton drank down his brandy as he would a glass of water on a hot day. He let his head fall back against the comfortable headrest of his favorite leather chair. A curse on all mothers and sisters, he thought with weary venom, and closed his eyes.

He was back in his mother's drawing room a week before. A note summoning him there had been awaiting him when he returned home from a morning visit to Tattersall's, where he had been trying to close a deal for the purchase of a pair of matched grays for his new curricle.