There, too, the Prince told her, were men and women with dark Saracenic eyes, who sang the age old songs of the wandering troubadours from Provence or the strange lilting music of Moorish chants.

‘I would love to hear them,’ Mistral cried.

‘One day I will take you there,’ the Prince promised. But she no longer shrank from the idea of being with him and answered confidently.

‘I would like that. Please tell me more. How much there is to know about Monte Carlo besides the fact that it has a Casino!’

‘There is an old proverb,’ the Prince replied, ‘which says, “The shine of gold makes me blind.”’

‘So they are blind to all this,’ Mistral sighed, looking to where a shepherd boy, wearing a mantle of goat skin and playing a flute like those played a thousand years earlier by his Grecian forbears, was tending a flock of fleecy sheep in a field of scented clover.

In more modern times the history of Monaco grew sad and stormy and the Prince related how the powerful patrician families of Guelf and Ghibelline turned the place into a battlefield, how the brilliance and prosperity begun during the reign of Prince Honoré II was swept away by the French Revolution. Prince Honoré had been intelligent and a lover of beauty, he had brought to the Palace a splendid collection of works of art and founded a picture gallery which contained paintings by the greatest artists of the Renaissance.

The revolutionaries deposed Honoré III – then the reigning Prince – confiscated his possessions and pillaged the Palace. The art collections were stolen or auctioned at ridiculous prices. The Palace was used first as a hospital, then as a workhouse, its glories disappeared, it sank into a dismal neglect.

‘It is heartbreaking,’ Mistral cried. ‘What happened then?’

‘By chance,’ the Prince replied, ‘Gabriel Honoré, afterwards Honoré V, met Napoleon on the lst March, 1815, on his return from Elba. Both sovereigns informed each other that they were about to return to their own States.

‘It was not thought of as an important meeting at the time, but chance encounters in life often have far-reaching and strange results. A chance encounter can alter one’s whole future.’

Mistral’s thoughts turned towards Sir Robert. Theirs had been a chance encounter that night when they met in the darkness of the garden. But would there be far-reaching or strange results from it?

When Sir Robert left Monte Carlo, she might never see him again. Her heart contracted at the thought. She did not know why, but that chance encounter had left its mark upon her and she could not forget it.

She was aware that the Prince was silent, his eyes on her face.

‘Of what are you thinking?’ he asked.

‘Of chance encounters!’ she answered truthfully.

‘Our meeting was one in point,’ the Prince replied.