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other end. “I got a letter from her today. She said she gave away the roses I sent her and that we can’t be anything more than friends.”
    “Well then, you have your answer.” Muriel’s feet touched the carpet briefly as she leaned down for her book. “She’s proved she’s not worth a minute of your time. Why can’t you just forget her?”
    “Forget her!” A sob tore from his throat. “Could you have stopped loving Sidney at will?”
    “That’s different. Sidney loved me in return.” She drew in an exasperated breath. “Douglas, Mother always told us how Bethia’s Hampstead clan has this bizarre affinity for servants. Her father married a cook, her half sister a stable boy. They’re low-class people who happened to come into money and now think they’re better than the rest of us. Why would you wish to associate with anyone from that lot?”
    “The heart doesn’t think about such things,” he said with all the pathos of a lovelorn poet. “It only knows that it loves.”
    “Oh, spare me the sentimental rubbish,” Muriel groaned.
    They had had variations of the same argument for the past three weeks. She knew how this one would end, even if she reasoned with him until blue in the face. Reaching for the bell cord, she said, “Some cake would make you feel—”
    “I don’t want any cake! I’m older than you, in case you’ve forgotten, and you don’t have to treat me like a little boy!”
    “Sorry,” she said, lowering her hand.
    His hazel eyes filled with worry. “I shouldn’t have followed her to Cambridge.”
    “You don’t say?”
    The sarcasm in Muriel’s voice was lost on her brother, for he nodded thoughtfully and said, “I should have given her a little time. She would have begun to miss me . . . I just know it.”
    “Mm-hmm.” Muriel reached again for the bell cord. All this agony over a cook’s daughter.
    “I said I don’t want cake!” Douglas snapped.
    “It’s for me! ” she snapped back.

Six
    One week progressed and then another, with Douglas Pearce occupying less and less space in Bethia’s mind as she immersed herself into the routine of lecture, study, letters home and to Guy, and forays to Fitzwilliam Museum to fill a new sketchbook with eighteenth-century costumes. Lady Audley’s Secret was scheduled at the Royal Court for April, after Romeo and Juliet and a four-week run of The Runaway by an American touring group. It was not too soon to be thinking about wardrobe, to be prepared to purchase fabrics during Christmas vacation.
    On Sunday the seventeenth, Bethia dressed in a skirt and short jacket of camel-colored moss cloth to accompany a group of thirteen students on the short walk up Cambridge Road. Heavy on her mind was the ten-page composition she had completed last night on the British Reformation. Should she have included Poynings’ Law?
    How could you have overlooked that? she admonished herself, for even though the legislative supremacy Henry VII had established in Ireland had nothing directly to do with the Reformation, it later enabled his son Henry VIII to impose the Reformation on that country.
    But since Henry VII’s actions predated his son’s reign, she could not simply tack the material onto the end. Nor could she insert it at the beginning, for she had already numbered the pages. Not wanting to mark through the page numbers and have Dr. Becker deduct points for sloppiness, she would have to copy again the ten pages sitting on her study table.
    Surely it’s good enough as it stands.
    Good enough. Her mind might as well have replaced the words with inferior, for the feelings they evoked, and she knew what she would be doing after lunch.
    Twelfth-century Saint Andrew’s was a squat, solid structureof light brown stone, with Gothic perpendicular windows and a handsome clock tower. Lime trees shaded the lane leading through the churchyard to the south entrance. In the nave, Bethia reluctantly pushed aside all thought of the composition. As