First Comes Marriage by Mary Balogh

places.

    “You are not, I perceive,” she said the next time, “a conversationalist, my lord.”

    “I find it impossible to converse meaningfully in thirty-second bursts, ma’am,” he told her, an edge to his voice. Particularly when every villager appeared to be shrieking at every other villager with no one left to listen—and the orchestra played louder to drown them out. He had never heard such a hideous din in his whole life.

    Predictably, she laughed.

    “But if you wish,” he said, “I will pay you a compliment each time we meet. Thirty seconds will suffice for that.”

    They parted before she could reply, but instead of being quelled by his words, as he had intended, she laughed across at him with her eyes while Huxtable twirled his partner down the set and they all prepared to dance the figures over again.

    “Most ladies,” he said the next time he met his partner and turned back-to-back with her, “have to wear jewels in their hair to make it sparkle. The natural gold in yours does it for you.” It was a rather outrageous claim since her hair was distinctly mousy, though the candlelight did flatter it, it was true.

    “Oh, well done,” she said.

    “You outshine every other lady present in every imaginable way,” he told her the time after that.

    “Ah, not so well done,” she protested. “No lady of sense likes to be so atrociously flattered. Only those who are conceited.”

    “You are not conceited, then?” he asked her. She had precious little to be conceited about, it was true.

    “You may certainly tell me, if you wish, that I am ravishingly beautiful,” she said, turning her laughing face up to his, “but not that I am more ravishingly beautiful than anyone else. That would be too obvious a lie and I might disbelieve you and fall into a decline.”

    He looked at her with unwilling appreciation as she danced away. She had a certain wit, it would appear. He almost laughed aloud, in fact.

    “You are quite ravishingly beautiful, ma’am,” he told her as they clasped hands at the top of the set.

    “Thank you, sir.” She smiled at him. “You are kind.”

    “But then,” he said as he began to twirl her down between the lines, “so is every other lady present tonight—without exception.”

    She threw back her head and laughed with glee, and for a brief moment he smiled back.

    Good Lord, was he flirting with her?

    With a dab of a plain woman who was not dazzled by his rank or greedy for his compliments? But who danced for all the world as if life held no greater joy?

    He was surprised when the set ended. What, already ?

    “Is there not a third Miss Huxtable?” he asked her as he was leading her back to the spot at which he had met her.

    “A third?” She looked inquiringly at him.

    “I was presented to Miss Huxtable, the dark-haired lady standing over there,” he said, nodding in her direction, “and to Miss Katherine Huxtable, her younger sister. But I thought there was a third.”

    She looked keenly at him, saying nothing for a moment.

    “There is not a third Miss Huxtable, ” she said, “though there is a third sister. I am she.”

    “Ah,” he said, his hand going to the handle of his quizzing glass. “I was not informed that one of the sisters had been married.”

    And poor woman, she had certainly been passed by in the looks department in that family, had she not?

    “ Ought you to have?” Her eyebrows arched upward in evident surprise.

    “Not at all,” he said briskly. “It was merely idle curiosity on my part. Was your husband Sir Humphrey’s eldest son?”

    “No,” she said. “He was the younger of two. Crispin is the elder.”

    “I am sorry about your husband’s demise,” he said. A foolish thing to say really since he had not known the man and it had happened quite a while ago. “It must have been a nasty shock.”

    “I knew when I married him,” she said, “that he was dying. He had consumption.”

    “I am sorry,” he