“Please – you know I have to think – over what you said about talking to each other – and it will not be easy.”

“Then dine with me tomorrow night.”

“I – should not do so.”

“But you will.”

“I don’t know – I cannot think at this moment, please – let me think or the decision I make might will be – wrong.”

She was pleading with him, her head thrown back because he was so much taller than she was, her eyes looking up into his.

He gazed down at her and then he said quietly,

“You know that I want more than I have ever wanted anything before is to kiss you goodnight. Yet because, whatever you may say, I am wooing you, Thalia, gently and, as you would say, like a gentleman, I would not do anything you would not want me to do.”

Thalia drew in her breath.

Something in the way he spoke, the quietness of his voice and the fact that there was no cynicism or mockery in it, made her heart beat in a very strange way.

“Thank – you,” she said, in a whisper he could hardly hear.

Then she ran away from him almost as if she would find protection and shelter waiting for her at the door of Number 82.

The Earl stood watching until, noting that she did not look back at him, he wondered if she was aware how much he wanted her to do so.

Then the door opened and she disappeared inside.

*

Out riding the following morning before the majority of the fashionable world was awake, the Earl turned over in his mind what had happened the previous night and thought that he had never spent a more interesting or intriguing two hours.

Nothing that he had expected had happened and he knew he should be feeling frustrated and perhaps angry that his plans had gone awry.

Instead he found himself fascinated in a manner that made him know that Thalia was different from anyone he had ever met before.

Then he told himself cynically that he was only thinking that because she had refused to accept his protection, which was something that was certainly unique in his experience.

He supposed, when he had decided to make her his mistress that he had not taken into account that she was decidedly of a different class from any of the women who had enjoyed his protection in the past.

‘I suppose one could say she is a lady,’ the Earl told himself as he rode into Rotten Row.

The question was how was it possible that the term ‘lady’ in the way it was conventionally used could apply to a woman who was a shop assistant and lived in a workman’s house in Shepherd’s Market. And who apparently had no relatives or background with the exception of an ailing mother.