‘Pray do not distress yourself, Mother,’ he said. ‘As you have just reminded me. I am the owner of a great estate and the happy possessor of a vast fortune. People will be ready to forgive my wife anything, yes, anything, rather than that the doors of Cheveron should be closed against them.’

If he had meant to wound his mother, he had succeeded.

‘Robert!’

Her enunciation of his name was a cry both of surprise and of horror.

‘Robert, you cannot mean – that you would – marry – this woman – and bring her here?’

‘And why not?’ Sir Robert enquired suavely. ‘have you forgotten, Mother, that Lady Violet is the daughter of a Duke?’

‘I have not forgotten that,’ Lady Stanford said, ‘but good breeding only makes her behaviour the more inexcusable. Besides, if you are to marry Lady Violet, she will have to obtain a divorce from her husband. Have you thought of that? A divorce, Robert!’

‘I have thought of it,’ Sir Robert replied.

Lady Stanford rose to her feet. Once she had been a beautiful woman. She still had remnants of that beauty and a grace which had grown rather than diminished with age. She looked very dignified now, although her face was ashen and there were traces of years on her cheeks.

‘Very well, Robert,’ she said quietly. ‘You are old enough to be your own master. If you choose to marry this woman, no one can stop you. She has a bad reputation and is ten years older than you are, but I know that nothing I or anyone else can say will alter your decision once you have made up your mind. However, on this I am determined. If you marry Violet Featherstone, I will not accept her. That is all I have to say.’

‘I understand.’

Lady Stanford turned towards the door. Sir Robert opened it for her, an angry ironical smile twisting his lips as he waited for his mother to leave the room. She looked at him for a moment, hoping perhaps for some softening in his expression, but when his eyes met hers, hostile, suspicious and resentful, she turned her head without another word and went from the room.

He had been cruel! Sir Robert knew that now, and yet at the time he had been angry with that bitter, burning anger which invariably rose within him when he could not get his own way and things could not he twisted and turned exactly as he wished them.

Why, he had asked himself then, as he had asked so often before, had he not met Violet when they were both younger? He ignored the fact that when she married he had been only a boy at Eton, and he remembered only that she was a lovely woman and that he desired her.