Chapter One
London was somewhat overwhelming to the two young ladies who entered it in an imposing traveling carriage late one April afternoon. Instead of talking and exclaiming over it as they might have been expected to do considering the fact that they had chattered almost without ceasing during the long journey from Gloucestershire, they gazed in wonder and awe through opposite windows as the crowded, shabby, sometimes squalid streets of the outskirts gradually gave place to the elegant splendor that was Mayfair.

"Oh," one of them breathed on a sigh, breaking a long silence, "here we are at last, Jenny. At last! And suddenly I feel very small and very insignificant and very . . ." She sighed again.

"Frightened?" the other young lady suggested. She continued to gaze outward.

"Oh, Jenny," Miss Samantha Newman said, turning her head from the window at last to look at her companion, "it is all very well for you to be so calm and complacent. You have Lord Kersey waiting here to sweep you off your feet. Imagine, if you will, what it must be like to have no one. What if every gentleman in town takes one look at me and grimaces in distaste? What if I am a total wallflower at my very first ball? What if . . ." She stopped in some indignation when the other young lady laughed merrily, and then she joined in reluctantly. "Well, it could happen, you know. It could!"

"And pigs might fly south for the winter," the Honorable Miss Jennifer Winwood said quite unsympathetically. "One has only to remember how all the gentlemen at home tread all over each other's toes in their haste to be first at your side at the local assemblies."

Samantha wrinkled her nose and laughed again. "But this is London," she said, "not the country."

"And so the crushed-toe malady is about to spread to London," Jennifer said, looking in affectionate envy, as she frequently did, at her cousin's perfect beauty--short and shining blond curls, large blue eyes framed by long lashes darker than her hair, delicate porcelain complexion saved from even the remotest danger of insipidity by the natural blush of color in her cheeks. And Sam was small without being diminutive and well-shaped without being either voluptuous or its opposite. Jennifer often regretted her own more vivid--and less ladylike--self. Gentlemen admired her dark red hair, which she had never been able to bear to have cut even when short hair became fashionable, and her dark eyes and her long legs and generous figure. But she often had the uncomfortable notion that she looked more like an actress or courtesan--not that she had ever seen either--than a lady. She longed to look and be the perfect lady. And she never really craved gentlemen's admiration.

Except Lord Kersey's--Lionel's. She had never spoken his name aloud to anyone, though she sometimes whispered it to herself, and in her heart and her dreams he was Lionel. He was going to be her husband. Soon. Before the Season was out. He was going to make his formal offer within the next few days or weeks and then after her presentation at court and her come-out ball their wedding was to be arranged. It was to be at St. George's in Hanover Square. After that she would have to be presented at court all over again as a married lady.

Soon. Very soon now. It had been such a long wait. Five endless years.

"Oh, Jenny, this must be it." The carriage had turned sharply into a large and elegant square and was slowing outside one of its mansions. "This must be Berkeley Square."

They had indeed reached their destination. The double front doors...