his traveling clothes for a long silk dressing gown, brilliantly printed with blue and red dragons, that was doubtless in the height of style. Brant was by far the most fashionable of the three brothers, not only in his dress, but in his friends and pastimes, as well, living fast, hard, and expensively. If Brant maintained that Revell was like last summer’s leaf, tossed wherever the wind took him, then Revell thought that Brant and his set were more like the sharks that swam in the China Sea, sleekly deadly and ready to tear apart their fellows without a thought.
“Circumstances, circumstances,” he now mused. “What precisely are the circumstances here, dear brother? You choose to come here in this obscure provincial household instead of spending the holidays with me at Claremont House, after which I receive the most distraught appeal from your hostess, accusing you of being a veritable fox in her henhouse.”
“There was no need for Lady Fordyce to have contacted you,” said Revell testily. “I am hardly anyone’s notion of a fox.”
“She didn’t contact me,” answered Brant, maddeningly mild. “She invited me to join her party. And since you seem to have found the—oh, what shall we say it is? The Christmas plum pudding? Sir Henry’s rum punch, famous throughout the county? The salubrious invigoration of the local air?—so thoroughly irresistible, I accepted, and now join you.”
“Badger me, you mean.” Angrily Revell thumped his fists on the back of the chair. He hated it when his brother lectured him in this bemused paternal fashion, as if there were twenty years between them instead of two. “Damnation, Brant, what kind of idiot do you take me for? I know exactly why you’ve come, and it’s not for some blasted plum pudding!”
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