Poor little thing! He wondered what life held for her in the future. It was unlikely that she would remain so innocent for long with a face like that. Well, at any rate it had nothing to do with him. He wondered now why he had asked her to come to him if she was in any trouble. If she took him at his word, it might be a difficult situation to explain to Violet. And yet even Violet had no right to question his actions yet. He had not asked her to marry him, but he had no doubt she would accept him if he did so.

Still his mother’s letter waited for him. Well, he was not going to open it now. He would pretend to himself that it had only arrived the following morning and he would read it at breakfast.

Almost as if she were in the room he heard a quiet voice say, ‘The Nuns would call that a prevarication.’

Quite suddenly Sir Robert felt annoyed.

Damn the girl with her conscience and her prayers, and damn the letter lying there, white and accusing. Why couldn’t his mother leave him alone? If he wished to go the devil, he would go his own way without so much weeping and wailing about it.

He was tired, he would go to bed. It was too late at night or too early in the morning, whichever way one liked to put it, for a man to be confronted with the ethics of good and evil, right and wrong.

Sir Robert crossed the room, walked into his bedroom and slammed the door behind him. The wind coming in from the open windows stirred the papers on the writing desk. The letter from Lady Stanford did not move. It lay in the centre of the desk, the sunshine enveloping it with a golden warmth.

3

Emilie glanced around the sitting room with an air of satisfaction. The breakfast laid on a spotless white cloth in the window was appetising and elegantly served. So far things had gone exactly as she had planned them and she felt the thrill that a General might feel when his troops have been successful in some carefully prepared manoeuvre.

She and Mistral had arrived at the Hôtel de Paris the night before. They had travelled in what appeared to Emilie to be astonishing comfort on the railway which now connected Monaco with Nice. Inevitably she must compare every step of the journey with the one she had taken nineteen years earlier with Alice. Then they had travelled slowly and in much discomfort, and when finally they reached Nice, they had been confronted with the choice of an uncomfortable antediluvian vehicle, which carried eleven passengers daily between Nice and Monaco, or an extremely unsafe-looking steamer which put out to sea erratically and was known at times to lie in harbour for a week on end without attempting the journey.