“You sound very sure of yourself.”

“And you are not as frightening – as I thought you were.”

The Earl raised his eyebrows.

“What makes you say that?”

“Because you have just reassured me, although you may not be aware of it, that you are a gentleman and that, whatever you might do to me, you will not hurt – Mama.”

The Earl did not reply and after a moment Thalia took a step nearer to him.

“I am right?” she questioned. “I am right about – that?”

It was a plea and after a moment he said ruefully,

“I concede that, but nothing more.”

He saw the relief in her eyes and it touched him. There was something very valiant in the way she fought for her mother.

He put down his glass of brandy and rose to his feet.

“I will take you home.”

“Thank you,” Thalia said simply.

As they went downstairs, she had the feeling that she was escaping from something menacing that strangely had not frightened her as much as it should have done.

The noise of music and voices as they reached the hall were louder than they had been before.

The Earl’s carriage was waiting outside and, as they stepped into it, it struck Thalia that she had just been through an experience that might at some time prove useful if she could write about it.

It would be interesting to be able to describe what a private room really looked like.

As the horses moved off, the Earl asked,

“Will you give me your hand?”

It would seem petty and childish, Thalia thought, to refuse to do what he asked.

She put out her hand towards him and he took it in both of his.

She felt the warm strength of his fingers and it gave her a rather strange sensation that she had never known before.

“Will you believe me,” the Earl said in his deep voice, “if I tell you that, although our dinner together was not in the least what I expected, I have enjoyed every minute we have been together and that I want more than I can tell you, to see you again.”

“It’s too – difficult, my Lord,” Thalia replied, “and – something we should not do.”

“It is something I want to do,” the Earl said, “which is a very different matter, I think, Thalia, when you go to bed tonight, it would be rather disappointing, having read the first chapter of a book, to find that there was no more to come and you had reached the end.”

What he was saying was very reasonable and, she had to admit, true. But she was afraid.

She could not ignore him as a man, as she had been able to do for the first part of the evening, because she was acutely conscious of his hand holding hers and that they were sitting very near to each other.