“We must entertain, my dearest, and who will look lovelier than you at the head of the table? And, of course, presiding over the ball we must give every year.”

‘There is really no place here for me now,’ Thalia thought sadly.

She put on one of the beautiful gowns that her father had ordered for her and her mother before he bought anything else and she could not help wondering what the Earl would think if he could see her in it.

She knew it was very different from the grey gown she had worn in the shop or the simple muslin in which she had dined with him.

Her new gown accentuated the perfection of her figure, the whiteness of her skin and was a frame for the shining glory of her hair with its touches of fire.

A fire, Thalia thought miserably, that would never burn in her again whatever compliments she might receive and whatever man’s eyes looked into hers.

She walked slowly across the lawn, thinking as she smelt the fragrance of the Rose Garden that it was still, with its weather-beaten Elizabethan brick walls and water-lily pool, one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen.

‘It is a place for lovers,’ she thought instinctively.

Then she drew in her breath, as if the thought stabbed her physically like a sharp dagger.

She walked between the beds, crimson, white and pink with their roses in bloom, to stand looking down into the water-lily pool thinking that she must remind her father to replace the goldfish that had been there when she was a child.

Then she asked herself what did it matter?

Goldfish were what children loved and she would never have any children to try with their small fat hands to capture the elusive little fish or to bring her, as she had brought her mother, the first primrose of the spring.

She knew what she wanted more than anything else was a child who would resemble the Earl because he was his father.

Then, as the tears, never far from the surface, came to her eyes, she felt ashamed of her own weakness.

‘I will go back to the house and find something useful to do,’ she told herself severely.

As she turned, she heard the footsteps of somebody walking into the Rose Garden and thought that it must be her father.

Because she knew it would upset him if he saw her in tears, she blinked her eyes to prevent them from falling and turned her head aside as she sought for a handkerchief in the sash of her gown.

Several tears fell before she found it and a voice she had not expected to hear asked,

“You are not crying, Thalia?”

She gave a little gasp of astonishment.

Then her eyes, wide and shining with tears, looked in amazement to see the Earl standing beside her.