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Grace fought the urge to close her eyes and groan. John was only ten, but already he possessed his father’s lethal charm.

“Mama,” Mary said. “I was walking to the conservatory when—”

“What Mary means to say,” John cut in, “is that I was walking to the orangery when she bumped into me and—”

“No!” Mary protested. “That is not what I meant to say.” She turned to her mother in obvious distress. “Mama!”

“John, let your sister finish,” Grace said, almost automatically. It was a sentence she uttered several times a day.

John smiled at her. Meltingly. Good gracious, Grace thought, it would not be long before she’d be beating the girls away with a stick.

“Mother,” he said, in exactly the same tone Jack used when he was trying to charm his way out of a tight spot, “I would not dream of interrupting her.”

“You just did!” Mary retorted.

John held up his hands, as if to say—Poor dear.

Grace turned to Mary with what she hoped was visible compassion. “You were saying, Mary?”

“He smashed an orange into my sheet music!”

Grace turned to her son. “John, is this—”

“No,” he said quickly.

Grace gave him a dubious stare. It did not escape her that she had not finished her question before he answered. She supposed she ought not read too much into it. John, is this true? was another of the sentences she seemed to spend a great deal of time repeating.

“Mother,” he said, his green eyes profoundly solemn, “upon my honor I swear to you that I did not smash an orange—”

“You lie,” Mary seethed.

“She crushed the orange.”

“After you put it under my foot!”

And then came a new voice: “Grace!”

Grace smiled with delight. Jack could now sort the children out.

“Grace,” he said, turning sideways so that he might slip by them and into the room. “I need you to—”

“Jack!” she cut in.

He looked at her, and then behind him. “What did I do?”

She motioned to the children. “Did you not notice them?”

He quirked a smile—the very same one his son had tried to use on her a few moments earlier. “Of course I noticed them,” he said. “Did you not notice me stepping around them?” He turned to the children. “Haven’t we taught you that it is rude to block the doorway?”

It was a good thing she hadn’t been to the orangery herself, Grace thought, because she would have peened him with one. As it was, she was beginning to think she ought to keep a store of small, round, easily throwable objects in her desk drawer.

“Jack,” she said, with what she thought was amazing patience, “would you be so kind as to settle their dispute?”

He shrugged. “They’ll work it out.”

“Jack,” she sighed.

“It’s not your fault you had no siblings,” he told her. “You have no experience in intrafamilial squabbles. Trust me, it all works out in the end. I predict we shall manage to get all four to adulthood with at least fifteen of their major limbs intact.”