Helen sat up. She was awake now, but even so she looked down at the pillow next to her own. It was as smooth and plumped-up as when the maid had left it.

Pieces of consciousness began to fit together again to make the flat jigsaw of reality. It wasn’t Tom she was looking for, it was Darcy.

Last night she had agreed to marry Darcy.

Helen got out of bed and went out on to her balcony. It was very early. A single gondola wove under the Rialto Bridge and a flat barge full of refuse chugged prosaically past her. A thin veil of mist was rising from the water.

Helen scrambled haphazardly into her clothes and slipped down through the sleeping palazzo. Outside it was cold and she shivered under her thin sweater, then began to walk determinedly. She knew the network of little alleys well now and she moved without hesitation over the worn paving and up and over the sharp summits of the tiny bridges. Her mind was working just as quickly.

She pushed away the uncomfortably erotic dream and the memory of Tom Hart. It clung too closely, and together with the sensuality that Venice seemed to breed in her she was troubled by a physical longing that she had never known before.

Instead she thought of Darcy and the immensity of the promise she had made. She was happy to think of the happiness that it would have given him, but a shadow of uncertainty darkened everything else.

She had never thought of marrying Darcy, yet when the moment came she had agreed unhesitatingly.

Helen clung to that. If she had answered yes without soul-searching, almost without thought, then deep down inside herself she must know that it was right. Yet she was disturbed to find that she couldn’t recall Darcy’s face. After her dream Tom Hart’s was crystal clear, every mysterious and mocking plane of it.

The ripples generated by the shock of Darcy’s telegram spread on outwards in her thoughts. Helen remembered her mother, and smiled. Her mother would be delighted with whatever and whoever made her daughter happy, but she would be an unnatural mother if she were not even more pleased because Darcy was who he was. Then there were Their Royal Highnesses.

No. That was what she and Tom had called them.

Lord and Lady Montcalm, rather. Helen smiled again, gleefully this time. It would be amusing to see their faces when Darcy took her to Montcalm again, this time not as an unnoticed friend of Oliver’s, but as their future daughter-in-law. She wouldn’t be afraid of them any more. She would have Darcy with her.

Helen’s pace quickened. She knew that she wanted to see him again very much. In only two more days they would be together.