Mistral’s beauty, her clothes, her pearls, the way she was allowed to speak to no one save the Prince, were all the subject of continuous and unceasing comment.

Prince Nikolai said openly that, while he was honoured by their acquaintance, he knew as little as anyone else who the two women were or where they had come from. But of one thing Sir Robert was quite sure. There was nothing scheming or crafty about Mistral. Sometimes he would meet her eyes across the Casino and think there was an appeal for help in them.

At those times he longed to comfort her, to take her away from those glittering rooms to the quietness of the garden where they could talk together. There was something wistful and lost about her. She was only a child and he knew without being told that she was often unhappy and still more often afraid.

Yet what could he do? He was powerless, as was everyone else, in the face of Madame Secret’s determination to speak to no one save the Prince. Many people had tried to rub up an acquaintance at the gaming tables. It was quite an easy thing to do as a rule, but any attempt at conversation was met with a stony silence on the part of Madame Secret, while anyone who spoke to Mistral in her presence was speedily and effectively vanquished.

He was perhaps the only person who had managed to talk with Mistral, and he had been careful to tell no one that he had been successful where everybody else had failed. She liked him and trusted him, he knew that. There had been undisguised pleasure both in her smile and in her greeting when he had drawn his horse up beside her on the sea shore that morning.

‘Where did you find your new acquaintance?’ he asked, referring to the dog which was bounding round her with yelps of delight.

‘He found me,’ she replied, ‘and now he will not leave me.’

‘I’m not surprised at that,’ Sir Robert remarked.

‘All the same, it will be difficult to convince him that I am not able to take him into the Hôtel de Paris. Can you see their faces of horror if he walked across their beautifully clean carpets with dirty feet?’

Mistral gave a little sigh.

‘I have always wanted to have a dog of my own.’

‘I would like to give you one,’ Sir Robert said.

‘May I?’

Mistral glanced up at him with a startled expression.

‘Of course not,’ she replied. ‘Aunt Emilie would never let me keep it.’

Sir Robert had swung himself down from his horse to stand beside her. The maid had withdrawn, he noticed, to a discreet distance and was looking out to sea.