Emilie had never met them before, those nephews and nieces of her mother’s and her own first cousins, and she had not expected such a warm greeting or such a sincere one when she had written to ask if she and Alice might visit them for a month or so. She had almost expected a refusal in reply to her letter despite the fact that Marie had spoken of Louise as being her favourite sister.

Aunt Louise had indeed taken them to her ample bosom, and her family of six boys and four girls had been none the less generous in their efforts at hospitality. Emilie had always been inclined to be superior and standoffish with her French relatives, for she liked to remember that her father was an Englishman. She had also when she was quite young been aware of her own illegitimacy and felt aggressively self-conscious that this stood as a barrier between her and her mother’s family. But in actual fact she need not have worried herself on this score. The Riguad family accepted the result of Marie’s courtship with the young Englishman as philosophically as they accepted a bad lambing season or a storm which did damage to the crops.

It was a pity, but there was nothing to be done about it, they would aver with a shrug of their shoulders, and they were far more awkward with Emilie because she had a sharp tongue and they felt that her English blood made her despise them than because they had any inclination to cast aspersions upon her parentage.

Just as her grandfather, old Louis Riguad, had accepted philosophically and without reproach the irregularities of Marie’s love affair and eventually Emilie’s own arrival at the farm, so the rest of the family had looked upon it as part of the inscrutable ways of Providence.

If anything, they were rather proud of Emilie’s connection with a distinguished English family, especially after John Wytham brought Alice to Brittany. Alice was a true aristocrat, the Riguads told themselves. They all learned of her arrival at the farm in the extraordinary way that news travels among families without the aid of the written word, and they knew too that she was the result of John Wytham’s marriage with a lady of his own class.

That the child of such a union should be brought to Marie Riguad’s home to be brought up by her was a compliment to the whole Riguad family. If Emilie had feared that she and Alice might prove unwelcome at Monaco, her mind was set at rest within a few minutes of her arrival.