What could she say to him? With a sudden groan Emilie rose to her feet and walked across the sitting room to the window. The brilliant sunshine, the sparkling blue of the sea and the soft movement of the palm trees were a hollow mockery to the dark tumult of her feelings.

‘The little rat!’ Emilie said aloud. ‘I always hated him!’

Even as her words were spat forth on to the soft air, she thought that she might have been speaking of almost any man she had ever met. Yes, she had hated them all with a hatred bred in her from childhood by the ignoble position in which she had been born. That was her father’s fault. She had hated John Wytham, half for her own sake, and half because she was jealous of the undying love her mother bore him.

And after her father with his careless regard for the ties of parenthood she had hated Léon Bleuet, her husband.

Only for a very short while had Léon evoked in her any feeling but one of disgust and dislike. She could recall their first meeting as if it had happened yesterday. She had travelled from Brittany to Paris, and how vividly she could remember that journey!

How strange she must have looked, severely dressed in her best Sunday black, her face grave and resolute as she set out on an almost desperate adventure!

Jacques Riguad, her grandfather, had died but two months after her mother had passed away. It had been suggested by the family that the younger of old Jacques’ sons, although he already had a farm of his own, should help Emilie keep the family estate together. She might continue to live in the farmhouse, but would spend all the hours of daylight in the fields and tending the animals. She could see their heads nodding together as they agreed on this, their work-worn hands almost applauding their own generosity.

But Emilie had already made up her mind as to what she intended to do. She had indeed been making her plans for years, and while to her family they were astounding, to her they had already become common place because she had considered them for so long.

First Mistral was to go to school, not to the kind of cheap establishment which lay within the limits of the Riguad purse, but to an Academy for Young Ladies or to one of the expensive Convents at Lucerne or near Paris.

On this Emilie was determined. She had decided a long while ago that Mistral must be properly educated, decided it when she was walking the motherless baby up and down the kitchen floor. Hidden in a secret place were the pearls which Alice had given into Emilie’s keeping the night before she died.