a man who treated his horses better than he'd treated his wife. His second wife.

Lydia glanced up at the portrait of the children's mother. The oil painting had been commissioned at Charlotte Gray's request for her husband's Christmas gift in 1858. After presenting it to him in the morning, Charlotte promptly excused herself from her family's revelry and leaped to her death from the widow's walk. She had been thirty-seven years old and had left behind two grown sons, a twelve-year-old daughter, Jeannette, and four-year-old Eve.

The sorrowful gaze of the blond-haired Charlotte stared down from the wall. Her lonely expression had haunted Lydia since she'd first come to this house—it bore a look of pain that Lydia understood firsthand. It was almost as if the two shared aearly evening gave them a specter-like appearance. Perhaps Floyd Gray had come back to torment her. It would be just like him.

"Less than a month hardly seems reasonable, and her father was killed in the same carriage accident that took our father," Eve told her siblings. "You don't want society saying we were heartless."

"She never loved our father, and she certainly isn't mourning the loss of him now," Mitchell declared.

"But what of her own father?" Eve asked. "She has lost him, as well."

Marston quickly countered, "They were never close."

"That's right," Jeannette agreed. "Not only that, but she made Father's life miserable. He told me so on more than one occasion. She was cold and indifferent to his needs."

Frowning, Lydia folded her gloved hands and sighed. She had tried