CHAPTER SEVENThe next half hour took all of Bettina’s ingenuity. Having failed to dislodge her, Alice accepted her presence with poor grace and clung to Michael like a limpet.
Bettina acted as their guide, pointing out one bloom after another, while Alice kept saying, “isn’t that lovely, darling?”
Michael winced every time she called him ‘darling’, but Bettina supposed he could hardly reprove her in the presence of a third person, however much he might want to.
It was clear that he was telling the truth when he had said he did not want to marry Alice, but Bettina would have given much to know what there had once been between them.
Ignorant of fashionable Society, she could hardly imagine that Alice had become so sure the Earl owed her a proposal of marriage without some encouragement f
