“Forgive me one moment, Richard, before we continue with our conversation. I have a note I have to send without delay. It will not take me long.”

He walked towards the writing desk as he spoke.

*

Thalia, trimming a bonnet automatically but with her usual skill, found it impossible to keep her mind on anything but the Earl.

She had gone to bed thinking of him and had been a long time going to sleep and, when she awakened, it was to think of him again.

She found herself going over their conversation of the night before.

First of all she kept remembering the note in his voice when he bade her goodnight and the strange feelings he had aroused when he had kissed the palm of her hand.

Even to recall what she had felt created an echo of it within her and she wondered how she could have lived so long without experiencing that particular feeling and why it was like no other emotion she had ever known.

‘I cannot see him again – I cannot!’ she told herself as she walked with Hannah to work.

When Henry had arrived later in the morning with a letter from the Earl, she had known, even before she opened it, what her answer must be.

He had forced her into dining with him last night – blackmailing her was the right word – but it must not happen again and she was sure, because she could appeal to his finer instincts, that he would not do anything to hurt her mother in revenge.

That was all that mattered.

At the same time, having sent Henry away with a note that she had written hastily at the desk where Mrs. Burton did her accounts, she had told herself despairingly that the conversation that had taken place the night before between herself and the Earl would be the last intelligent one she was likely to participate in until her father’s return to England.

Being with the Earl had made her realise that for the last three years her brain had been starved, just as her body had been, only to a greater degree.

Sir Denzil had played such a large part in Thalia’s life that it was only when he was gone that she realised what a huge void he had left and how desperately she missed him.

She loved him because he was her father, but his place as a companion had, she thought looking back, been an almost unique relationship between a father and his daughter.

Because their minds were attuned and Thalia was so advanced for her age, they had talked as though they were equals and Sir Denzil had found in his daughter the only thing that was lacking in the perfection of his wife whom he adored.

Last night, Thalia thought, despite the many emotions that had been evoked within her, had been an intellectual delight that she would never know again.