Adam had received notification that there was going to be a country dance in the village the following evening, but it had not so much as occurred to him that he might go.

As a younger man, he had sporadically attended such functions with his father.

“There is more pleasure to be had in a country dance than in half a dozen balls at St. James’ Court,” his father had always said.

Adam had duly attended such functions in order to be obliging and enjoyed them well enough, but he had always felt a little uncomfortable. The young ladies of the village had always smiled at him a little too eagerly, and he had always been uncomfortably aware of the way that they must have perceived him as a prospect to be conquered.

Now, he did not suppose that anyone would be greeting him with such eagerness believing him to be a blackguard of the worst kind. However, there was one thing that made the idea of attending the assembly appealing in the extreme — so appealing, in fact, that he might have been prepared to risk the icy stares of most of the village.

He marveled that he had never seen Miss Miller at any of these assemblies. He was not sure it was that she had not been out when he had attended them, or perhaps her father had guarded her very jealously and prevented her from attending.

He feared that the latter was the case. Nonetheless, that did not stop him from entertaining the hope that he might meet Miss Miller there.

Even after he had dressed for the ball, he stood before his looking glass, wondering whether he was doing the right thing in attending. Was it a pretense too far, a grab at normalcy that he had no right to claim? Worse still, would it be seen as an insult to the memory of Mary Warwick?

Though he was not guilty of her death, the idea that he might be seen to be disrespecting her memory pained him greatly. He actually reached up to his throat to start removing his cravat, telling himself that his presence at the assembly would be unwise, and he would be far better to abandon the plan.

But something stopped him.

To be more precise, that something was the thought of Miss Miller’s face.

He had recorded the memories of their handful of encounters as carefully as if he had been taking her likeness, committing to memory the quality of the light, the arrangement of her hair, the color of her dress.

Yet, this little collection of impressions was feeling ever more sparse. He longed to see her, to gather some more impressions of her that he would later be able to contemplate at his leisure, to carry with him like talismans against the misery that lay in wait for him at Lawley Hall, which sprung upon him every morning and evening when he was turned away from his father’s bedchamber.

He had had to contend with banishment for long enough, he told himself. Why should he banish himself from the presence of the very thing that brought him joy?

The room fell silent as soon as he entered. It was not the usual hush that he had come to expect when he attended an assembly in his home village — the reverent silence of a crowd who knew that a member of the aristocracy had come among them. Rather, it was an overtly hostile silence, the silence of a group that had sensed the presence of an outcast.

For what felt like an eternity, Adam stood in the middle of the room. Though he felt the burn of the scrutiny of dozens of eyes, he stood up straight and ensured that none of his discomfort was showing in his face. Instead, he gave a cordial bow to the Master of Ceremonies, who returned the gesture.

The room fell back into its chatter. It seemed that nothing would distract the people of the village from matters of society, entertainment, and courtship. At least, not for very long.

He cast around the room anxiously. At first, he feared that he had risked this humiliation for nothing, that Miss Miller would not be in attendance, after all.

But then… there she was.

If he had been asked to describe her gown or the arrangement of her hair, he would not have been able to do so, save to say that her entire appearance was such that all her beautiful features were displayed to their best advantage.

Her hair was arranged about her face and adorned with a few sprigs of white flowers, and something about the effect made her eyes seem to sparkle all the more. Although he did not dare to look at her for more than a few seconds, there was a brief moment of eye contact, and Adam was reminded all at once of a line from Shakespeare:

O! She doth teach the torches to burn bright.

He had thought, that morning in the grove, that Miss Miller was at her most charming in the bright light of the early morning, but now he was forced to revise his opinion. She seemed to sparkle under the chandelier, though her dress was amongst the plainest and most simple of anyone’s at the ball.

It took all that he could to stop himself from striding straight to her side and asking that she reserve every dance for him, for he could scarcely bear the idea that she would stand up with anyone else.

But he had the sense to refrain from doing so. He knew that if he were to behave so, then within the hour there would be a rumor about some attachment between himself and Miss Miller, and he had no wish to subject the young lady to a share in his disgrace by associating himself with her.

Perhaps I should not have come at all, he thought, rebuking himself. Perhaps all I have done is thrown myself in the way of a temptation that I may prove unable to resist.

But he did his best to steel himself. After all, why should he stay away? He was innocent of all the charges leveled at him, and keeping away from society now that he had returned to Lawley Hall, would only be taken as further proof of his guilt. Better to come out now and face their stares and demonstrate that he had nothing to be ashamed of.

It seemed the room was evenly divided between those who had missed his company and were pleased to see him back in the village, and those who thought him a terrible criminal and lacked only the audacity to snub him properly.

He was vague about his activities abroad and did not give anyone the satisfaction of providing any details that he knew would later be used as fodder for gossip.

And so he managed to spend the first ten minutes or so greeting those at the assembly with whom he had some acquaintance. He danced with an old family friend, a Miss Young, and managed to irritate her greatly by glancing over her shoulder the whole time to see if Miss Miller was likewise engaged.

“It is good to see you back, Adam,” she said with exasperated fondness, “but I do wish that you would discard your pretense, and get to whatever it is that you really wish to do.”

He took her at her word, bowed, and excused himself.

Miss Miller was standing with a young woman whom Adam vaguely recognized. If she had noticed his presence, then she was not showing it.

The warmth of the room and the vigor of the dancing had brought a charming flush to her cheeks, and for a moment, Adam simply stood back and admired the effect. He could not help but compare her to every other young lady in the room and found her so obviously superior that he was amazed she was not being surrounded by every other young man.

How could his feelings for her have developed so quickly, he wondered? But the fact of the matter was they had, like a horse running away, and now he could only do his best to try to catch up with them.

He was surprised by how nervous he felt when he approached her. It felt strange to greet Miss Miller with a bow. It would have been more natural to approach her the way he had in the grove, with a passing comment that would have suggested an intimacy that lay beyond the rigid boundaries of formal convention.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I am not sure whether I should consider us formally introduced since we are old acquaintances.”

“An acquaintance, once made, never dies,” Miss Miller replied, turning away from her friend to meet his eyes. It was the same playful look that she had cast over her shoulder at him in their last meeting in the grove, and Adam felt quite overcome by it. He smiled — a smile that signified far more than any of the polite nods and bows that were being exchanged all around them.

“Indeed,” he said. “To be sure, an acquaintance can only grow richer with the benefits of time and good conversation.”

Miss Miller did not seem to think this observation required a response but merely nodded in such a way that Adam knew she understood his meaning correctly.

She introduced him to her somewhat familiar friend, and he bowed too, but the truth was that he did not even remember the name that Miss Miller said. He could scarcely hear it over the blood that was thumping in his ears when he looked at Miss Miller, and when he opened his mouth to speak, he felt almost constricted, such was the force of the physical feeling in his chest.

“Might I have your hand for the next dance?” he asked.