“I would like you to introduce yourself to Catherine, and I would like to boast about you and tell her what a fortunate fellow I am.”

“Will you come with me to the library to write our letters after all?” he asked. No, he did not deserve to be forgiven so easily or so soon. She remembered that humiliating and painful caning her father had given her just three evenings ago. Until she remembered everything she had lost. She wanted to reach out to touch his hand and to assure him that though he had done a terrible thing, all would be well after all. She wanted to comfort him, Jennifer realized suddenly. “How would we live with ourselves if we could not feel the assurances that that does happen?” Perhaps good would come out of the ending of her world too, she thought. There was the blond and blue-eyed Elizabeth and the new home and country. “I am glad,” she said, “that she is happy, that good has come out of evil.” His stepmother must have thought that the world had come to an end when she found herself with child by a lover and when that lover cruelly abandoned her though she loved him. He shook his head, but she was not sure if it was a denial or a refusal to discuss the matter. She wondered if she imagined that his whole body tensed. “But you had doubts.” His thumb played with the corner of the letter. “I told you last night that I believed you,” she said. It seemed almost as if there was anxiety in his voice. Jennifer folded the letter carefully back into its original folds and slid it across the table to her husband. I miss your good sense and your cheerfulness. I cannot think of anyone who more deserves it-though I do not believe the woman exists who deserves you. He has given me Eliza and so I was the winner of that encounter. I hope at least that HE is not in town this Season. Has Society accepted you back, Gabriel? I should have insisted, perhaps, that you allow me to announce the truth so that your name would be cleared. It is, perhaps, a pity that she so resembles her father, but I can console myself with the certain knowledge that she will be a great beauty. She is so very fair and so wonderfully blue-eyed. But no matter, I have Eliza and so I would not change the past. I was seduced by youth and beauty and a charm that proved selfish and heartless.

I owed your father loyalty, for he was never harsh with me. My woman’s intuition assures me of it! But more of that in another letter. I do not believe you met him, though I was acquainted with him before you left. You said it would happen to me and it has. “ ‘I know I do not deserve the happiness I feel in this lovely home you found for me, in this beautiful country, in my daughter, and-oh, yes, Gabriel-in the new love I have found, which quite puts into the shade the old love.

“ ‘I dread to think what would have happened to me without your kindness and protection,’ ” she continued.

Mary balogh dark angel series