It struck the Earl that, perhaps she was the love child of some Nobleman, who had callously omitted to provide adequately for the baby he had fathered.

There were plenty of love children about and they commonly were both beautiful and talented.

That, he thought, must be the explanation.

But those he had met in the past had always been acutely conscious of their position and certainly had not the pride or the self-possession that was, he thought, characteristic of Thalia.

She had certainly been brought up in genteel circumstances. There had been no mistakes in her behaviour at dinner last night and the way she ate, moved and behaved would have been acceptable at Carlton House and would have borne the scrutiny of the most critical of the great London hostesses.

She was certainly well bred, the Earl decided, and there was nothing that she had done or said that he could fault.

Going over their conversation he found that there was no other lady of his acquaintance who could equal the sharpness of her brain or the manner in which she could fence with him so that he had to use all his ingenuity not to leave her the victor.

She was well bred at least on one side of her parentage, intelligent, well-educated, and yet, if Henry was to be believed, at one time so impoverished that she had not enough to eat.

It was all an enigma that preoccupied the Earl’s mind until several acquaintances, who raised their hats to him, were astonished when he rode by without even glancing in their direction.

The difficulty, he was thinking, was what he was to do about Thalia.

Her ‘rules’ were certainly going to make it very difficult for him to see her as much as he wished to do, although he had no intention of moving out of her life as she had suggested.

It suddenly struck him that this was what he had been looking for. Someone who kept him guessing, who had to be pursued as cleverly as any fox and who would certainly make the chase an adventure such as he had never enjoyed before.

This was, however, not the reason he had returned to London from Hellington Park, where he had decided to look for a wife.

But marriage could wait while his pursuit of Thalia could not and he began to plan the type of house that he would install her in, which would be very different from the one in Chelsea that had been occupied by his last mistress.

He would not insult her by putting her where he had kept any previous woman and, as he considered the houses he had seen and what vicinity would be most suitable, he suddenly thought that perhaps after all he would not be able to persuade her to accept his proposition.