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the reason for her own name. And that the reason there had never been a “Hope” or “Prudence,” “Clemency,” or “Charity” to keep her company in the nursery as her parents had originally planned was because they seldom could get together in a bedroom without fighting for long enough to have produced one. Except of course, for that one time Faith knew of, but that, she thought suddenly, coming stark awake in distress as she always did at the thought, was foolishness, since it wasn’t for anyone else to hear, know, or think about. Even herself, she decided.
    As for those elves of Lady Mary’s, Faith thought, the late hour and her own weariness calming her and helping her to store away untidy thoughts that sometimes came slipping out of closets where they’d been safely locked when she was too weary to take care which doors she opened in her mind, why, she didn’t believe in spirit. She’d stay the summer here in England and she’d do the pretty with the gentlemen, and then she’d go home, heart - whole and whole-heartedly, to take up a useful life. And she’d leave no languishing suitors behind her either.
    She’d already decided to pass her time with gentlemen who were no more serious or susceptible than herself. That way she could keep to the letter of her agreement with Grandfather and not harm anyone in the process. There were enough foolish young lordlings to tarry with here, and when their company palled, there was Will to confide in, and the Earl of Methley for humor and spice. That languid gentleman seemed to take nothing seriously, and if he had a heart that did more than lazily pump blue blood through his lanky frame, she’d be very much surprised.
    When her last conscious thought of the night came—and with it, the vision of dappled sunlight and the scent of pines, for it was an image of the dashing gentleman the noblemen at the house party had called the Viking—she smiled. Though admittedly, his presence had been oddly disturbing, unlike the lusty fellows that name they’d given him implied, he’d seemed more intent on warning her to behave properly than set on ravishment.
    Perhaps, she smiled into her pillow as the feathers in it winged her away across the night, they ought to have called him the Missionary instead.
    The gentleman drew his dressing gown more closely together about his naked form and belted it around himself. Then he smiled, on a yawn, and picking up a crystal decanter, raised it and a tawny brow as well at his unexpected visitor.
    “No,” he yawned again, even as he poured out two glasses, “unfortunately you have not interrupted anything. This is the countryside, remember, sir. This is Stonecrop Hall. When I go to my chambers here, my bed is just as chilly and empty as my ancestral halls are at this hour of the night. It’s odd, I grant you, but when I’m in residence in London where there are several hundred people I know and wish to avoid, I can take whomever or even whatever I choose to my bed because it is the City, and I’m not as likely to be remarked upon. But here, where my nearest neighbors are pheasants, I repair to solitary sheets, to preserve,” he grimaced, “my good name.”
    Then he grinned as he presented a glass to his visitor, who was already seated at his ease in the library, and taking a twin goblet to his own lips, he drank before settling in an adjacent chair near the newly laid fire.
    “Pheasants,” mused his visitor, “and the Duke and Duchess of Marchbanks.”
    “On the whole,” the gentleman mused, holding his glass to the firelight and watching the light dance in the amber liquid there, “I prefer the pheasants. They’re wittier, and I can shoot them if I wish.”
    “But it is about Marchbanks that I’ve come,” the older gentleman said softly.
    “Really?” his host asked, running a hand through his tousled, varicolored hair. “Then I must be sleepier than I thought, or it’s possible that I’ve not really wakened to find