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Broughton, had dropped by to see if she could persuade her younger daughter to lunch with her in Pall Mall.
    She’d found Evelyn seated in Agatha’s Louis XIV chair, competently managing a stream of deliveries and tradesmen. Evelyn had declined the offered meal on the excuse that she had too many details to address before she left for East Sussex. At which point Francesca, who knew nothing about any such plans, decided to keep her daughter company until the arrival of the American lady on whose behalf Evelyn was traveling to some place called North Cross Abbey.
    She’d seated herself on the plump yellow chaise, pulled her tatting from her chatelaine, and proceeded to draw from her daughter a recital of her adventures over the past few days.
    If she felt any disapproval of the means her daughter had used to gain access to Mr. Powell’s town house, she hadn’t voiced them. She only looked up when Evelyn mentioned the cut on her leg and, after having been reassured that the wound was healing nicely, returned to her tatting.
    “Why?” Evelyn replied in response to her mother’s mild query. “We both know it would only be to satisfy convention, and I don’t think there’s enough convention in East Sussex that it needs satisfying.”
    “Do we?” her mother murmured, frowning over an intricate knot.
    “Yes, we do,” Evelyn replied, jotting down the projected costs of shipping five hundred hothouse gardenias to North Cross Abbey.
    “If you say so, dear,” Francesca said. “I suspect you know best. Besides, Justin Powell doesn’t strike me as the sort of gentleman who would take advantage of a lady.”
    Evelyn, in the midst of her calculations, didn’t think before speaking. “Oh, he would. He has.”
    The sudden termination of movement from the chaise alerted her to her mistake. She looked up and met her mother’s startled eye.
Oops
.
    “You aren’t listening to rumors, are you, dear?” Francesca asked. “You know how unreliable they can be.”
    Unhappily conscious of her vow to remain mum on the Underhill matter, a vow she had just come perilously close to breaking, Evelyn regarded her mother mutely.
    Francesca set her lacework down in her lap. “I can’t quite believe it. Justin Powell, a cad.”
    Evelyn attempted not to squirm. Her mother would be enlisting her father’s aid to stop her from going to North Cross Abbey if she didn’t quickly remedy her blunder. “I didn’t precisely mean
that
. I only meant that he has a Certain History where women are concerned. But before you get upset, Mama—”
    “I’m not upset, dear.” And truthfully, Francesca looked perfectly composed, as opposed to Evelyn.
    “Besides,” Evelyn said, “all that is in the past. Mr. Powell assures me that he is reformed.”
    “He does?” Francesca said. “Well, I suppose that’s nearly an admission, isn’t it? I mean, you can’t reform if you haven’t done anything worth reforming, can you?”
    “Er, yes. I mean, no.”
    Francesca shook her head. “Who’d have thought it? I mean not that he’s not perfectly yummy and all—and you needn’t look at me like that, Evelyn, I’m not so ancient that I can’t appreciate a handsome young man—but he never seemed in the least bit
interested,
if you take my meaning.”
    “Not really,” Evelyn said wryly, thinking of Justin’s interest in Mrs. Underhill.
    “Your father and I run into Mr. Powell occasionally in town. And though he has very sweet manners, he always seems a bit, well,
vague
.” Francesca smiled and shook her head. “He struck me that way at Verity’s coming-out, too. I distinctly remember commenting to your father how unlike the other young gentlemen he was.”
    “I don’t think he seems vague,” Evelyn said.
    “No?”
    “No. Perhaps you mistake his extreme ease of manner for a lack of interest in what’s going on, but I feel confident that very little goes unnoticed by Mr. Powell. He just doesn’t conform to the usual pattern, you see, and