“Tell me – tell me what you have discovered – and how?”

“I should like you to have trusted me with your secret,” the Earl said.

“How could I,” Thalia replied, “when I was not the only person involved?”

“You mean somebody helped you?”

“Helped me?”

“Was it a man?”

The Earl’s voice was sharp and, as Thalia looked at him in surprise not understanding what he was saying, he said,

“I suppose I might have guessed that it could not be entirely the work of a woman. After all only a man could have managed to put the innuendoes in such a way that each gentleman who read it would think it was referring to himself.”

“Read – it?” Thalia said beneath her breath.

Then in a voice that was very different from the way she had spoken before, she said,

“Y-you – are talking about – my book!”

“Of course,” the Earl replied. “What else did you think I was speaking of?”

He saw the look of relief spread over her face, which brought the colour back to her cheeks and the light to her eyes.

Then she made a little sound that was half a laugh and half a sob and put her glass down on the table as if it was too heavy for her to hold.

“My – book, of course – that is what you have discovered about me!”

“I cannot actually claim the credit,” the Earl said. “It was a friend of mine who found a man in Hatchard’s employment who was prepared to sell him the truth in exchange for two guineas.”

“Why should he be interested?”

There was now a touch of Thalia’s old spirit not only in her voice but also in the look in her eyes.

The Earl laughed.

“You are obviously not aware that you have set the whole of White’s by the ears. They suspected that it was one of their members who was holding them up to ridicule and they were determined, when they discovered who he was, that he should be expelled from the Club.”

“You mean – they were – annoyed?”

“Quite a number of them were very annoyed.”

“How many copies do you think they have bought?”

There was no doubt she was eager to know, but the Earl had not missed the transformation that had taken place since she had discovered that it was her book he was talking about and not something that to her was infinitely more sinister.

‘What can she be hiding?’ he asked himself. ‘What crime could she have possibly committed?’

Then he remembered that she had said that her secret involved other people besides herself.

If it was not her mother who was in trouble, it could only be her father.

The Earl turned over in his mind how he could broach the subject. Equally he had no wish to frighten Thalia as she had been frightened when she met him that evening.