Sir Robert took his key from the desk and went up to his suite. It was empty and shrouded in darkness, for he had told his valet not to wait up for him. The air in the big sitting room seemed stale and stifling until he had pulled back the curtains and flung open the windows. Then as the light streamed into the room, he saw his mother’s letter waiting for him, lying in the centre of the big writing table. He stood looking at it for a long time until without touching it he walked across the room to where on the mantelpiece stood a photograph of Violet.

She had placed it there herself the day before, giving it to him as a present, already enclosed in a wide silver frame.

‘I would hate you to forget me when I am not with you,’ she had said in one of her moments of tenderness.

‘As if I could do that,’ Sir Robert protested.

‘I find it very easy to forget people,’ Violet smiled.

He had felt a wave of jealousy sweep over him.

‘Will you forget me easily?’ he asked, and he caught her in his arms and kissed her savagely until she cried out for mercy. But he would not let her go.

‘Will you forget this? – and this? – and this?’ he asked, kissing her again and again. Yet even as he did so, even as he was incensed by jealousy sweeping over him in a red flood tide, he had been aware that she had roused him deliberately, and some logical part of his brain had chid him for being a fool, at allowing himself to play the part which was expected of him.

Now Sir Robert looked at Violet’s photograph. She was attractive, there was no denying that. The dark chestnut hair drawn back from her low forehead, the faint smile in her eyes, the enticing twist of her lips. She was not a beauty by classical standards and yet when she entered a room no one could ignore her presence. His Mother thought she was a bad woman, and yet was Violet really bad?

Sir Robert was surprised at the question. How had it ever come into his mind? He had never asked it before.

‘I suppose it must be the effect of that funny little girl I met in the gardens,’ he thought.

She had said that she was going to do penance for having done something of which her aunt would not approve. Penance for watching the dawn! He wondered what sort of penance she would do if she did something really wrong. One day he would ask her, and then he wondered if she could answer such a question. Her knowledge of what was wrong would be very limited. She would obviously be lamentably ignorant of the world, having been brought up by Nuns from the age of six.