“It’s a long story, but shall I tell you simply that I now own a gold mine and a very successful one at that!”

“Denzil, why did you not write to me?” Lady Caversham asked.

“Write?” Sir Denzil exclaimed. “I wrote the first month.”

“I never received the letters,” his wife murmured.

“Then,” Sir Denzil went on, “I could hardly write, my darling, when I was living in the back of beyond!”

“And you really own a gold mine, Papa?” Thalia asked.

“I not only own it, but I have floated a Company on the stock market, which will make me even richer than I am already!”

“I cannot believe it!” Thalia exclaimed.

“I will tell you all about it,” he said, “but first I must tell your mother how much I love her and apologise for not letting her know sooner that I can now give her everything in the world she has ever wanted.”

“All I want is – you Denzil,” Lady Caversham murmured tearfully.

Her husband smiled over her head at his daughter in a conspiratorial fashion.

“That is what you have,” he said, “and I would have been here sooner, my darling, if I had not thought it expedient to call on Lord Eldon first.”

Thalia looked at him apprehensively.

“It is all right? You are allowed to return?” she asked in a low voice.

“The Lord Chancellor was exceedingly kind,” Sir Denzil replied. “He did suggest, and I think he is right, that we should leave for the country immediately and stay there until it is generally accepted that I am back and all my affairs are now in order.”

“That is what Mama has always planned we would do,” Thalia said.

“And that is what we will do,” her father replied. “I don’t suppose that you have much to pack? There are two carriages waiting for us.”

“You intend we should leave now?”

“What is there to keep us?” Sir Denzil replied. “We will not require any of this rubbish in the future.”

He waved a disparaging hand towards the furniture in the room and then he looked down at his wife with an expression of love and consternation in his eyes.

“I will make it up to you, my precious, for everything you have suffered while I have been away,” he promised, “and now you shall have all the things you gave up for me, diamonds, jewels, horses, and we will do all the repairs to The Manor that we always planned we would do when my ship came in.”

He gave a laugh with a triumphant note in it.

“Well, my ship is in and a very large one it is at that.”

‘It is like old times,’ Thalia thought, to have her father boasting of his triumphs, elated by some success and seeming to make everything he said an excitement in itself.

He bent and kissed his wife again before he said,