He was beginning to suspect that his secretary’s feelings for him might be a trifle too warm, but never for a moment did Harry guess at the depth of the obsession that would cause her to sleep with the handkerchief against her cheek that night.

Harry turned in the doorway. ‘And do not accept any more cases. I am going to be tied up with one important one for the foreseeable future.’

‘Come in, Cathcart,’ cried the earl. ‘Tea?’

‘No, thank you. Do you have a problem?’

Rose had been sent to her room.

‘It’s Rose again. She wants to make that Cockney maid of hers a companion. She does give Daisy the credit, I gather, for having persuaded her to get back in society.’

‘I think it might be a very good idea,’ said Harry. ‘Daisy’s demeanour is suitable, and with the right clothes she would not occasion comment.’

‘But companions have background!’

‘Then give her one. Any respectable recluse you know of in Hadshire who died recently?’

‘Well, let me see. There was Sir Percy Anstruther.’

‘Married?’

‘Married a girl half his age, who ran off and left him.’

‘Any surviving family?’

‘None as far as I know. I think the estate went to the Crown.’

‘Good. Daisy is his long-lost daughter. She fell on hard times. Her mother had reverted to her maiden name of Levine. You rescued her. All respectable. You discovered her true identity after she had been working as your daughter’s maid and promptly elevated her to companion in respect for your old friend, Sir Percy. She is a strong, moral girl and will keep a guard of Lady Rose.’

‘I sometimes think,’ put in Lady Polly, ‘that it might be an idea to give Rose just a taste of the asylum to discipline her.’

‘But think of the scandal,’ said Harry. ‘She would be lost to you and damned as mad for the rest of her life.’

‘Oh, very well,’ said Lady Polly. ‘But I will hire a lady’s maid for her and one that will keep a strict eye on her as well. Rose has some very odd ideas about going into society again. She insists on going to some boring lecture given by Mrs Angela Stockton.’

‘Mrs Stockton,’ said Harry, consulting the papers he had taken from his office, ‘is fabulously wealthy and of good family.’

‘But a lecture . . . !’

‘And has a son of Rose’s age.’

Both the earl and countess looked at Harry. ‘Now that’s different,’ said the earl. ‘Nothing up with money in the family, hey.’

CHAPTER FIVE

I am silent in the Club,

I am silent in the pub,

I am silent on a bally peak in Darien;

For I stuff away for life

Shoving peas in with a knife,

Because I am at heart a Vegetarian.

No more the milk of cows

Shall pollute my private house

Than the milk of the wild mares of the Barbarian: