It was, apparently, his fault.

He was starting to feel a little disoriented. “Why do you want me to stay at home?”

Belinda shifted, lips pressing together; he could see she was hunting not for just words but for how to explain. The other two looked at her, deferring to her. Eventually she met his eyes. “We asked you to stay, each of us every time, but you always just smiled and insisted that you had to go back to town. We suspected-well, everyone in the neighborhood knew-that you were going there to find a wife. We didn’t want you to do that, but we couldn’t just say so, could we? You wouldn’t have listened to us, that was obvious. So we had to find some other way of stopping you.”

He stared at her. “You don’t want me to find a wife?”

“We don’t want you to find a wife in London.” Belinda capped the statement with a definite nod-repeated by the other two, one after the other.

It was, indeed, as Sybil had guessed. Compressing his lips, he battled to shore up a patience that six months of mayhem-let alone all the futile racing back and forth-had worn wafer-thin. “Sybil has just told me about the situation with the Hardestys.” He managed to keep his tone even, his diction not so clipped that it would cut. He was still very fond of them, even if they’d temporarily turned into bedlamites. “You can’t seriously imagine that I would marry a lady who I would subsequently allow to send you away.”

Yes, they could. Yes, they did.

They didn’t say the words. They didn’t have to; the truth was writ large in their eyes, in their expressions.

He felt positively insulted, and didn’t know what to say-how to defend himself. The idea that he needed to was irritation enough.

“I’m older, and wiser, and far more experienced than Robert Hardesty. Just because he’s married unwisely is no reason whatever to imagine I’ll do the same.”

The look Belinda bent on him was as contemptuously pitying as only a younger sister could manage; it was mirrored to an unsettling degree by Annabel and Jane.