No one else was present and no one ever knew exactly what he said or what Alice replied, but she must have told him of her interest in his house and perhaps how it reminded her of her grandfather’s mansion in England, for the next day the Duke’s carriage called at the Riguads’ shack to take Alice to the Chateau. It was only when the carriage arrived that Alice related what had happened the day before, and before Emilie, dumbfounded and astonished, could make any protestation, she had driven off alone.

If Emilie was speechless then, she was certainly not speechless when Alice returned. She took her out on to the shore, for there was little privacy to be found in the Riguad household, and she extracted from her the whole story of her meeting with the Grand Duke. Word by word she learned all that had taken place that afternoon at the Chateau.

‘He is very kind,’ Alice kept saying, ‘and his little son is so sweet.’

That is not the point,’ Emilie insisted. ‘Why did he ask you?’

‘He wanted to show me his Chateau.’

‘And why should he want to show you his house? He has friends of his own class.’

Alice merely looked at her.

‘I think I am his friend,’ she said quietly.

It was then that Emilie had raved at her, speaking brutally as she had never spoken in all the eight years that they had lived together.

She told Alice what she knew already, that her father had never married Marie Riguad. She told her how her grandfather had come and fetched him away back to England, promising a sum of money for the unborn child which Marie expected, but forgetting either deliberately or inadvertently to send it.

‘It was to have been my dowry,’ Emilie said, ‘but do you think it would have been any help to me, born between two worlds, half of noble blood and half of peasant stock? The men who wanted me were like dirt, and the ones I might have liked considered that I was beneath them.’

‘Poor Emilie,’ Alice said simply, but Emilie had known that she had not understood.

Driven by her own fear she added,

‘That is what will happen to you, and to the child you may have if you persist in making friends with men like the Grand Duke. He will never be anything to you. He knows where you are staying and that we, the Riguads, are your relations. Can you imagine that someone like that will offer you marriage? No, he is interested in you because you are pretty, because you are young. There are thousands of women of his own world only too ready to marry him should he but say the word. A man like that is not concerned with marriage. You are not to see him again, do you hear me?’