“Daphne.”
“Mm?”
“You may take my queen.”
“What? Oh.” Daphne looked at the board. She did, in fact, see the queen. Her face, however, registered nothing of it. “Yes, of course.”
She moved her bishop and took the queen with the slow, polite indifference of a person at a tea party accepting a biscuit she had not particularly wanted. She set the queen down on the edge of the board next to the other captured pieces, but she did not seem to notice she had done it.
Alice looked at her sister.
Daphne looked at the window.
“Daphne,” Alice said again, more softly, “what is the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Daphne.”
“It is your move, Alice.”
“Daphne.”
Daphne lifted her face. Her cheeks went pink in two small particular places at the corners of her mouth in the way they did when she had been thinking about Isaac for a quarter of an hour and did not wish to be asked about it. “Alice.”
“Yes?”
“He is calling at noon today. Lord Dowton.”
“Is he?”
“To see Mama, he said. About something. I do not know what. He sent his card an hour ago.”
“To see Mama,” Alice repeated solemnly.
“To see Mama.” Daphne nodded once, very dignified. Then her face cracked, very briefly, in the small uncontrollable way it had when she was twelve. She let out a small laugh and bent over the chessboard, putting her face in her hands. “Alice, I do not—I do not know what to do. He is so very…”
“Sweet?”
“He is so veryinterestedin things, Alice.”
“I am aware. I have suffered three-quarters of an hour of leafhoppers.”
“They are not all leafhoppers. There are beetles as well.”
“I am aware of the beetles, Daphne.”
Daphne made a small, strangled sound behind her hands.
Alice could not help it. She threw back her head and laughed loudly, all of her in it, the laugh that had been described to her on three separate occasions by three separate governesses asunbecoming of a young lady of qualityand which she had, since the age of thirteen, decided was the part of her she liked most.
Daphne laughed too.
They laughed at each other. They laughed until their mother’s voice drifted up the corridor, asking what had got into the morning room. They stopped laughing with the very poor success of two grown women who had not properly laughed at one another in a great many months.
“Daphne—”
“My Lady, the Duke is here.”
