Rosy paced the floor of her bedroom, a fixed, strained expression on her face, her hands gripped into two small fists at her side and her normally clear, guileless dark blue eyes shadowed as she repeated the same four words over and over again under her breath. Even now she still wasn't sure she was actually going to be able to say them out loud.

'Will you marry me? Will you marry me? Will you marry me? Will you marry me?'There, she had said it and, even if the words hadn't sounded quite as firm and assured as she would have liked, at least they had been spoken. She was over the first hurdle, she told herself bravely, and if she could manage that one, then she could surely manage the other.

She swallowed hard and looked at the telephone beside her bed. There was no point in shilly-shallying; she might as well get the whole thing over and done with.

But not up here. Not sitting here on her bed in the privacy of her bedroom while she…

Quickly, she averted her eyes from the pretty girlishness of her flower-sprigged bedcover, virginal white with a scattering of flower posies. She had been fourteen the year she had chosen it; she was almost twenty-two now.

Twenty-two, but as naïve and unworldly as a girl still— or so she had been told.

Her throat closed nervously. She didn't need to remind herself exactly who it was who had said those words to her.

Quickly, she opened her bedroom door and hurried downstairs. She would use the phone in the room which had been her father's study and, before that, her grandfather's. To say those words in that room would be appropriate somehow, would lend them weight and dignity.

She picked up the receiver and punched in the numbers