Stella stretched her arms above her head and wished Chrissie would not get so worked up about things. She had always been the same. Perhaps it was because she had had an unhappy childhood.

Stella could remember how unkind her father and mother had been to their elder daughter. They had been acrobats, well spoken of in their profession and both good looking in their own way.

Chrissie had been born after her mother had had a fall. She said the rope was faulty, but her father always said that it was her timing which was wrong, owing, perhaps, to her own unnatural heaviness.

But whatever it was, Chrissie had been born three months early, weakly and malformed, and it was only the appearance of Stella two years later which had healed the wound to their parents’ self esteem at having produced anything so abnormal as their first child.

Stella had been a large, good-tempered baby. She smiled and chuckled her way through babyhood and from the moment she could toddle had been spoilt by everyone in the theatre. It seemed inevitable that Chrissie should be jealous of her young sister, but instead she had taken up a proprietary attitude. Stella was hers, to bully and protect, to tease and defend. If Stella did anything wrong, it was Chrissie who took the blame. If Stella was scolded, Chrissie would defend her pugnaciously. Stella accepted Chrissie’s championship, as she accepted other tributes, with smiling good humour and an equanimity which made no complaint one way or another.

Stella, having finished stretching herself, was just about to start another chapter of her novel when the door opened.

Thinking it was Chrissie returning, she turned her head and saw that instead of her sister it was the Rajah.

‘Hullo!’

Both her voice and her smile were pleasant and flattering, and he crossed the room quickly to the sofa, taking her hand in his and covering it with kisses.

‘I have been riding,’ he said, ‘or I should have come to see you earlier.’

‘You look very smart dressed like that,’ Stella said, and the Rajah’s dark eyes lightened at the compliment.

He was a short, thin little man, and when they stood close to each other, his head barely reached to Stella’s shoulder. Yet he was strong and wiry despite his over-luxurious way of living and the dissipations in which he indulged. But no one could live such a life for long, and in a few years he would be taking to drink and drugs to flog a depreciated vitality and a fading virility.

At the moment, however, the Rajah was young enough to gratify his sensual hedonism without thought of the future. There was a glint in his eyes as he looked down at Stella.

‘Would you like to come and watch the pigeon shooting this afternoon?’ he asked.

‘If you like,’ Stella replied. ‘Though I am not all that keen on guns, they make my head ache.’