‘No, please!’ There was a touch of panic in her voice. ‘My Aunt would be very angry if she thought I had spoken to a stranger. She has given me strict instructions about what I am to do and what not to do. She would also be horrified and shocked if she thought I had come here alone. Please, Sir Robert, do not let anyone know that we have met. Promise me?’

‘I will promise on one condition,’ Sir Robert replied.

‘A condition?’

Her voice was troubled, and she tried to draw her hand from his grasp, but he would not let it go.

‘Yes, a condition,’ he said firmly. ‘It is this, that if you are in any trouble, if you find yourself upset or perturbed by anything that happens in Monte Carlo, you will tell me. I am staying at the Hôtel Hermitage. You have but to send a note or a message and I will come to you at once. If we cannot meet where you live, then we can meet here. Is it a promise?’

The anxiety on Mistral’s face cleared away.

‘Yes, I will promise that. It is kind of you.’

In return I promise to tell no one that we have met and, if we meet again in public, to pretend that we are strangers. But I shall not forget this morning.’

‘And I shall not forget it either,’ Mistral replied. ‘The dawn was just as Sister Heloise described it, lovely – lovely beyond words.’

‘Yes, lovely beyond words,’ Sir Robert repeated slowly and insistently, looking down into her face.

For a moment her eyes were held by his, then as if he frightened her, she turned from him and went running down the path between the brilliant flowers with her grey cloak flying out a little behind her. She moved swiftly and with a grace which reminded him of some woodland nymph, until a turn in the gardens took her from his sight.

He did not attempt to follow her. Instead he put his elbows on the railings and stared out to sea.

‘Lovely – lovely beyond words,’ was how she had described it. And it was true. Slowly the sun rose and everything was intensified in brilliance. Now the last shadows of the night had disappeared from the sky, the sea was blindingly blue, and far away in the distance the island of Corsica was dimly discernible like a lilac cloud.

‘Lovely beyond words!’ Sir Robert repeated, then slowly, so slowly that it took him quite a time, he walked back to his hotel.

There was no need for the night porter to let him in. Already the chambermaids were astir, the marble doorsteps were being scrubbed.