Violet shuffled in a daze through the dining room, her half eaten supper left to the weary maid who’d stood at her elbow a quarter hour, softly clearing her throat as snow fell silently on the windowpanes. The baron and baroness, along with their son Lord Ainsley Shelton and his younger sisters, had retired thirty minutes ago. As was customary, the family of the house dined before their governess.
Angling for the door, Violet recalled the surreptitious wink Lord Ainsley had sent her as he departed along the path she now tread.
Was the wink meant as a silent acknowledgment of enduring feeling? she wondered. Perhaps it was nothing more than a weightless nod to her existence.
She flitted a glance at the discarded china scattered over the long dining table, her gaze alighting on *his* dishes. Although she knew him to be a voracious eater, a good portion of the younger Lord Shelton’s food had gone uneaten, too. Her mind turned somersaults, but Violet would not allow over-analysis of her erstwhile lover’s lack of appetite, or his fleeting wink, to upset the tenuous balance time had earned her. She was older now, she should have outgrown such fanciful notions.