How different she was from any of those tongue-tied girls whom his mother considered would make him an eligible wife! How different from the other women with whom he had flirted or to whom he had made love, but who had invariably become boring with their importunate demands upon him, with their protestations of love, which grew all the more fervent as his diminished!

He was never quite sure of Violet. One moment she would be pliable, gentle, and he would believe that she was ready to surrender herself utterly to him, her body and her love his for the taking. Then even as he held her in his arms, she would elude him. She would mock his very ardency, laugh at his passion, and he would feel and know her elusiveness even before she spoke. She did not belong to him but to herself. She was a will-o’-the-wisp, dancing over a quagmire of emotion.

There was something in her very recklessness and defiance which drew him. Violet cared nothing about what the world said of her. She was well aware of how they talked, she knew that her relations and the majority of her friends sided openly with her husband, whom she had left a few months ago after eighteen years of marriage, because, she said, she knew all his stories and they had begun to bore her.

The gossips who had been talking about Lady Violet Featherstone for years with bated breath were not surprised, but what did surprise them was that Violet had not run away with anyone in particular. She had merely set up a separate establishment of her own and had continued to dance her way into the hearts of almost every young man she met.

It was then that Sir Robert had met her, and from the first moment of their meeting he thought and dreamt of no one else. He was not a boy to take the most serious step in his life without thought, without consideration. He was well aware that if he did propose marriage to Violet Featherstone, it would mean grave changes in the plans he had already made for his future.

He might appear defiant to his mother, he might outwardly pretend it was a simple thing to take Violet to Cheveron as his wife, but he knew in his heart of hearts that it would be both complicated and difficult. And yet when Violet smiled at him, when she looked up at him from under her eyelashes, when she teased him in that delicious, intimate manner which was one of her most engaging tricks, he felt that nothing in the world mattered beside the eventual conquest of this fascinating, unaccountable woman.