Prudence, half-hidden behind a tub of roses, asked how the Countess liked her painting.

“She is well pleased with it,” Clarence asserted. “I saw that poor shabby thing Romney did. Pitiful. Made her look like a parrot Well, well, I see we are bathed in roses. Madrid in town?”

“Seville do you mean?” Mrs. Mallow asked.

“The Spanish fellow who is always dashing after Prudence.”

“No, Dammler sent these flowers, Uncle,” Prudence told him. “Such an abundance-almost an excess,” she peered at the Marquis as she said this. He was trying to look nonchalant, but there was a question in his eyes, and an unsteadiness about the lips.

“I guess we know by now what this means, eh?” Clarence announced with a smile of approval.

From Prudence’s blushes and Dammler’s self-conscious expression, Mrs. Mallow assumed her brother was right for once, and thought of a way to allow them privacy in these tight quarters. “Oh, Clarence, you’ll never guess who is here,” she lied brightly. “Mrs. Hering."

“Eh? No such a thing. I had a note from her only this morning and she is in bed with flu, poor soul. I shall tell her to have Knighton drop round to see her. He is always happy to make a call. He will go anywhere.”

“Not that Mrs. Hering. Her sister-in-law-the elder Mrs. Hering. She has taken the rooms right below us. We must go to see her."

"Yes, we’ll drop down this evening and make them welcome.”

“Let us go now, Clarence,” Wilma persisted with a rueful glance at Prudence, who bit her lip and nodded her head vigorously. “There is no study here for Prudence and Lord Dammler to chat about books in private. Writers want a little privacy. We’ll run along to see Mrs. Hering now, shall we?”

“I am always happy to listen to talk of books. They need not avoid the subject on my account”

“Yes, but she is waiting for us now, Clarence,” she persisted, then took him by the arm and suggested he bring Lady Cleff’s portrait for Mrs. Hering to admire.

Clarence, Wilma and Lady Cleff’s picture hastened into the corridor, and Wilma carefully closed the door behind them.

“Anunlooked-for piece of tact on your mama’s part,” Dammler said with a tentative smile.

“What delayed my uncle’s catching the hint even longer than usual might be that the elder Mr. Hering is a bachelor, you see.”

“In that case, they won’t be long talking to Mrs. Hering."

“No.” Prudence glanced to the door nervously, afraid her mother might not manage to keep Clarence out of the way. He would want to be in on the proposal, though he wasn’t properly dressed for it. Her impatience transmitted itself to Dammler. He arose and crossed the small room to where Prudence sat.

“Thank you for the rose garden, Dammler. I have been ferreting in all the boxes this past hour looking for a stray diamond. Did you forget?”

“The diamond, I trust, is by now on its way to you from Longbourne.”

“Just one?” she asked with a pout.

“Just one. I don’t mean to spoil you. If you prove satisfactory, I may give you another on our fiftieth anniversary.”

“Hmm. It seems to me a certain platinum-haired woman was wearing a great deal more than one at the opera…"

“She wasn’t wearing one on her finger.”

“To be sure, I didn’t notice her finger. With so many other interesting parts of her anatomy on view I overlooked that.”

“Darling, I’ve missed you terribly,” Dammler said, drawing Prudence to her feet.

In joyful confusion, she peeped at him a brief moment, then stared out the window. “It looks like rain again,” she said.

“Yes. Darling, my time at Finefields was utterly wasted. London was a desert without you. As to Bath, it has been the worst of the lot, with my trying to reform.”

“I daresay it will rain before evening,” she answered, examining the sky with a keen interest.

“Prudence, why do you keep staring out the window, pretending you don’t notice I’m calling you darling. I expect you to tell me how improper it is, that I might reassure you as to my intentions.”

Her heart took to capering on her, and the tumult welled up into her face, revealing itself in a mild form in a shy smile. “I noticed,” she said.

He placed his hands around her neck; they felt warm and pleasantly stimulating. “Well, Prude, no lecture to read me?” he said in a soft, caressing tone, his eyes glowing.

“Prude? Just bring on your Ottoman and see how wantonly I can disport myself.”

“Stop batting your amorous blue eyes at me, Prudence, or I’llkiss you to death.”

“What a novel way to die,” she answered, batting her eyelashes in a blatant bid for murder.

His head made a lunge towards her, but she pulled back.

“I am a trifle worried by all these flowers. And I haven’t heard the magic formula either. ‘Miss Mallow, will you do me the honour,’ it begins,” she reminded him.

“Prudent to the last gasp. I don’t mean to give you and Shilla any leeway in future. It’s back to the harem for her, and Longbourne Abbey for you.”

“I expect an abbey has been the scene of a love nest before. Especially Longbourne Abbey.”

“Shrew.”

“If there is a single mention of matched bays and a fancy set-up for the park, I shall certainly decline.”

“You shall marry me, Prudence Mallow, with or without the fancy set-up.” He pulled her into his arms without further bantering, and kissed her with the experience of a man versed in six tongues, plus a smattering of Hindustani and Chinese, and the passion of a poet in love for the first time. She responded as best she could in English, and a few phrases of French, with which language Dammler seemed well pleased. He did not despair of making her fluent. The first lesson went remarkably well and he was an enthusiastic instructor.

Some moments later they sat together on the sofa, with Dammler’s arm around her shoulder and Mrs. Hering and the relatives totally forgotten. “When did you fall in love with me?” he asked.

“When I read your Cantos from Abroad. Why should I be different from all the other ladies?”

“Before you met me? Then it wasn’t the fine teeth and the tumbling lock that did it? I was certain I was Hero Number One, who palled around chapter ten.”

“What conceit! As though I would put you into a book. And when did you discover I was neither a man nor your sister, and that your life was barren without my shrewish presence?"

"Not 'til I left you. I thought of you constantly in London, and was never happy but when I was with you, but I didn’t know it was love. I was quite happy with Shilla at Finefields. She was very good at first. Turned her damned hypocrite holy man out, just as I told her to, as soon as he asked her to copy out his sermon.”

“A bit of an Ashington, was he?”

“Of course he was. I loathed him. That should have tipped me the clue that you were Shilla, but 'till got looking about to find an acceptable lover for her, it didn’t dawn on me. I realized it was no other than myself meant to have her, say what she would. It was during a heart-to-heart talk in which I was telling her that an English lord-Lord Marvelman, in fact-would dash to her rescue that her eyes widened, turned blue, and I knew. What a damned fool I’ve been all these months, Prue. Why didn’t you tell me I loved you? I wager you knew.”

“No, no, when you urged Seville on me I had no notion you were interested in a ménage a trois.”

“Oh, Seville-I knew you didn’t love him. He would not have had anything but your body.”

“You have no objection to that?” she asked in a voice containing incipient pique.

“I have now! And who was the fellow who was admiring your shoulders? If it was that snake of a Springer…"

“Do you have your duelling pistols with you?”

“No, I’ll pull him apart with my bare hands and anyone else who looks at you too closely.”

“Oh, but most of my Bath beaux have to look closely-becoming short-sighted in their dotage, you know.”

“Don’t try to wiggle your way out of it; you’ve been flaunting yourself, Prudence. Those old dotards are the worst ones. I didn’t even notice at first that you were beautiful. It was such an unusual experience for me to fall in love with a lady from the inside out that I didn’t recognize it for love. Well you know my former views on that. I was always susceptible to ripe, luscious…"

“Yes, I don’t think it will be necessary for you to remind me again, Dammler. Ever. I suppose you are still susceptible to them.”

“No, only you. I’ve sown enough wild oats for ten men, from one end of the world to the other, and regret each, but at least they are all sown. How should I have time to think of such things, when every man you meet falls in love with you. I won’t have time for any passion but jealousy. Well, maybe a few minutes a day to love you.”

There was a warning rattle at the door, and Clarence and Mrs. Mallow entered. “It was all a hum,” Clarence said angrily. “Mrs. Hering is not here at all. Wilma has been taking me upstairs and down looking for her, and there was never an empty apartment in the building at all.” Something in the air told him events had transpired in his absence; perhaps the proximity in which his niece and Dammler sat, or their intertwined hands. “What have we here?” he asked suspiciously.

“Lord Dammler has asked me to marry him, Uncle,” Prudence said.

“I told you he only wanted a little encouragement,” he advised her, smiling fondly at his niece.

“She never gave me the least encouragement,” Dammler accused severely.

“She was always backward. I daresay she might have had a royal… well, well. Never mind that. So you are to become Prudence Merriman, eh? The Marchioness of Dammler," he rolled the title on his tongue, savouring its heady flavour. “Aye, and you will still be well-named, too. Doesn’t she look merry, Wilma?”

Wilma smiled happily, and embraced first her daughter, then, rather shyly, Dammler. Noticing her reserve, Dammler put both arms around his new mother, and hugged her. “I love you, too,” he said.

“He is strangely susceptible to mature women,” Prudence warned her mother. “You will want to stay out of his way when I am not about to protect you.” Mrs. Mallow laughed self-consciously, still wondering how her little daughter had managed to make herself so free with this lord, of whom she remained in awe.

“Prudence Merriman,” Clarence repeated. “Well named on both accounts.”

“Another name to live up to,” Prudence said with a sigh.

“And a title,” her uncle said. “A real title, not like Seville’s old foreign handle, eh, Nevvie?” he added to Dammler, whose eyes enlarged visibly at this familiarity. “You don’t mind my practicing up the term? It will take a little getting used to.”

The frequency with which it was soon repeated led the Marquis to believe his new uncle would have less difficulty mastering it than he feared.

“I shall do a wedding portrait of the pair of you," Clarence promised. “I have been wanting to get you on canvas a long while, Nevvie. But I am very busy. We all are. It is a good time for us. Lawrence, I read, is doing the Prince of Wales and his brothers and I have had the whole Chiltern family to do, five girls and two boys, each with a squint to be got rid of; but I have no trouble with that sort of thing. No trouble at all. Lawrence, I daresay, will give the whole Royal Family a broader form than he ought. But I will do you and my niece up nicely. You needn’t worry; I will put that quirk in your eyebrow. I will just lower it a fraction of an inch and you will not look deformed at all.”

Prudence opened her mouth to protest, but Dammler silenced her with a glance. “Can you do anything at all to make my wife look less hagged, Uncle?” he asked in a playful spirit.

“Ho, you are practicing, too, I see. My wife-very good, Nevvie. And Uncle-you will get on to it in no time. Yes, I will make my niece look as good as new or better. Well, well. I am not much of a one for writing letters, but I think this calls for a note to Mrs. Hering and Sir Alfred. They will want to hear that it is settled.” He arose and said to his sister, “Come with me, Wilma. We may leave these two alone a minute. Prudence, you know, always lives up to her name.”

They left, and Dammler turned to his bride. “Uncle is an original, isn’t he?”

“When we cease to live up to our jolly name, we can always have him to Longbourne Abbey to tease us. He has been good to me, Dammler, I hope you have not taken him in dislike…”

“Dislike?I adore him. He is half the reason I am marrying you. Come now, Prue, don’t laugh at me. If you were a natural girl at all you would be demanding to know what is the other half.”