Mistral rose from the table and walked across the room to her aunt. Emilie was taller than she was. She raised her lovely oval face to the older woman’s and said in a very low voice,

‘Aunt Emilie, you do like having me with you now, don’t you?’

It was the cry of a child for comfort, it was the yearning for love of someone who has never known love, but Emilie, who would have understood the same appeal eighteen years earlier in Alice’s voice, was deaf to it in Mistral’s.

‘Of course, Mistral,’ she said frigidly. ‘I am very glad to have you and I am sure we shall enjoy ourselves together. Now, call Jeanne, for I have some instructions to give her.’

She did not notice the disappointment in the girl’s face, did not see the sudden pain in those dark violet eyes and the soft droop of her lips.

Obediently Mistral went from the room to call Jeanne.

4

‘I think everyone in Monte Carlo is here tonight,’ Lady Violet Featherstone remarked, looking round the big dining room of the Hôtel de Paris where the tables were filling up so quickly that the appearance of each newcomer in the doorway seemed to provide another dilemma for the Maitre d’ Hôtel.

‘Alfonse was telling me that this is the best season they have ever known,’ Lord Drayton remarked from the other side of the table. ‘As the gross profits last year were six million francs that is no façon de parler. We should have bought come shares five or six years ago.’

Sir Robert smiled.

‘It is too late now!’

‘For you, Robert, that is not a tragedy,’ Lord Drayton remarked. ‘What would you do with any more money?’

‘I can answer that question,’ Lady Violet said. ‘He would spend it on me, of course.’

‘And what better excuse for being extravagant?’ Lord Drayton replied with somewhat ponderous gallantry.

Sir Robert took the menu from an attentive waiter.

‘Well, what are we going to eat? Violet, will you start with caviar or oysters?’

‘You order the dinner, Robert,’ she answered. ‘I want to watch the people, they always amuse me.’

It was not surprising that Lady Violet, used as she was to the glittering society at Monte Carlo, should feel interested in what she saw around her tonight. The Gala dinner at the Hôtel de Paris had been arranged as a compliment to a celebrated Italian opera singer who was to appear for the first time in the Concert Room at the Casino.

But any excuse served for a Gala evening, and because this was indeed the most brilliant and successful winter season the Principality had ever known, there seemed to be packed into those few acres of land all the wealth, beauty and aristocracy of Europe.