And the Miss Ran Away With the Rake - By Elizabeth Boyle Page 0,31
comes with a price, she was wont to say.
Great-Aunt Damaris had the effect of leaving one feeling scalded, but better for the experience.
“Who was that, she asks! It was him!” Phi said, as if that explained everything.
Daphne paused for a second and then felt a tremor of horror. Great-Aunt Damaris hadn’t made good on her threat of ordering the Right Honorable Mr. Matheus Dale to Town on some flimsy pretense.
She’d brought it up each time Daphne had visited, claiming the two of them would suit and had a matchmaker’s fire over the notion.
Advice Great-Aunt Damaris could offer in plentitude; matchmaking, however, was not her forte.
“Not Matheus,” Daphne whispered to Phi, who was once again looking out the window.
Phi shook her head. “No, not Cousin Matheus,” she said, making a moue of displeasure. Obviously this push of Great-Aunt Damaris’s to find a Dale cousin to marry the esteemed Mr. Matheus Dale had been tried before.
“So if it wasn’t Matheus, then who?” Daphne prodded, settling into the window seat, where she and Phi always had their hasty “coze” before Great-Aunt Damaris realized, with the uncanny sense of a cat, that someone was in the house and would have Daphne summoned upstairs.
Phi’s expression brightened. “Him!” Then she lowered her voice, which was a good idea, for any Dale worth their salt knew—or at least swore—that Great-Aunt Damaris could hear conversations uttered all the way up north in the family’s Scottish hunting box. “Oh, bother, Daphne. You truly have to ask?” Still, Phi leaned closer and whispered in a voice barely audible, “It was your Mr. D.”
Daphne’s mouth fell open. That man . . . that elegant, self-assured, handsome man (at least he’d seemed handsome at that distance) was her Mr. Dishforth?
“No!” Daphne said, glancing back at the door, restraining herself from jumping up and setting off after him.
After all, it was her lack of restraint that had plunked her right down in the scandal broth.
“That was him?” she managed.
“Yes,” Phi said. “Oh, I’m ever so glad you did see him.” Her cousin’s face wore a dreamy sort of expression, as if she’d just witnessed a miracle.
Daphne reached over and caught Philomena by the arm—if only to steady her own racing nerves. “Are you certain? The man wearing the superfine jacket and the tall beaver hat was Mr. Dishforth?”
Phi nodded. “Yes, and he carried a silver-tipped walking stick. A most elegant one. Oh, Daphne, he is so handsome, and he must be ever-so-rich.”
Rich? Visions of a large rambling country house once again danced through Daphne’s thoughts.
Handsome was one thing, but Daphne wasn’t so impractical as to not realize the benefits of falling in love with a wealthy man. “And he came here?”
“Yes. And I met him,” Phi declared. “He came to the door, and luckily for you, I was downstairs checking the salver for Herself.”
“Herself” being how most everyone in the family referred to Great-Aunt Damaris.
“He came here?” Daphne’s heart raced. “Where was Croston?” Great-Aunt Damaris’s butler would certainly have had a thing or two to say to his mistress about an unknown gentleman calling.
“Downstairs,” Phi said, her eyes wide with the luck of it. “Checking on tea. And luckily I caught the door before he pulled the bell.”
He. Mr. Dishforth. Daphne still couldn’t get over it, the image of the handsome stranger now burnt into her memory. “What did he want?”
Another foolish question, for Daphne knew all too well what Mr. Dishforth desired. Wanted. Had written so boldly.
My darling Miss Spooner, we cannot ignore that some day, some day very soon, we shall have to meet. I long for the moment when I first set eyes on you.
And Phi wasn’t so innocent not to see right through the feigned query, the desires behind it. “You, of course. He came calling to meet you.” She sat back and eyed her cousin with a look that was nothing less than incredulous.
Daphne opened her mouth to say something, yet nothing came out.
“Yes. Shocking, indeed,” the practical Phi said, echoing Daphne’s feelings precisely. Then Phi’s brows furrowed and her voice lowered noticeably—for Croston wasn’t above tattling. “You said he wouldn’t come calling.”
“He promised not to,” Daphne shot back. But then again, after last night . . . Oh, no!
What if, somehow, he’d discovered that she, Miss Daphne Dale, was his “dearest girl” after all and had been horrified by the scene she’d created.
Perhaps he’d come to call—in person, no less—to wash his hands of their entire affair.
Daphne shivered. It was no affair. Their letters were just that,