resented.
"Is the Duke coming?"

"Oh, surely. Lionel of Newhaven and the Lord of Northport are coming
with him. They're at the Palace now." Karvall hesitated. "His nephew's
back in town."

Elaine was distressed; she started to say: "Oh, dear! I hope he doesn't--"

"Has Dunnan been bothering Elaine again?"

"Nothing to take notice of. He was here, yesterday, demanding to
speak with her. We got him to leave without too much unpleasantness."

"It'll be something for me to take notice of, if he keeps it up
after tomorrow."

For his seconds and Andray Dunnan's, that was; he hoped it wouldn't
come to that. He didn't want to have to shoot a kinsman to the house
of Ward, and a crazy man to boot.

"I'm terribly sorry for him," Elaine was saying. "Father, you should
have let me talk to him. I might have made him understand."

Sesar Karvall was shocked. "Child, you couldn't have subjected
yourself to that! The man is insane!" Then he saw her bare
shoulders, and was even more shocked. "Elaine, your shawl!"

Her hands went up and couldn't find it; she looked about in confused
embarrassment. Amused, Lucas picked it from the shrub onto which she
had tossed it and draped it over her shoulders, his hands lingering
briefly. Then he gestured to the older man to precede them, and
they entered the arbored walk. At the other end, in an open circle,
a fountain played; white marble girls and boys bathing in the
jade-green basin. Another piece of loot from one of the Old Federation
planets; that was something he'd tried to avoid in furnishing
Traskon New House. There'd be a lot of that coming to Gram, after
Otto Harkaman took the _Enterprise_ to space.

"I'll have to come back, some time, and visit them," Elaine
whispered to him. "They'll miss me."

"You'll find a lot of new friends at your new home," he whispered
back. "You wait till tomorrow."

"I'm going to put a word in the Duke's ear about that fellow," Sesar
Karvall, still thinking of Dunnan, was saying. "If he speaks to him,
maybe it'll do some good."

"I doubt it. I don't think Duke Angus has any influence over him at all."

Dunnan's mother had been the Duke's younger sister; from his father
he had inherited what had originally been a prosperous barony. Now
it was mortgaged to the top of the manor-house aerial-mast. The Duke
had once assumed Dunnan's debts, and refused to do so again. Dunnan
had gone to space a few times, as a junior officer on trade-and-raid
voyages