Only when she heard him descending the stairs did she know that he had gone beyond recall.

And it was then, as she stood there trembling as if from the impact of some almost overwhelming violence, she knew that she loved him – loved him with her whole heart and now it was too late!

CHAPTER EIGHT

It seemed to Gretna that for the next few weeks there was never a moment when she was not at a party or getting ready to go to a party. Everyone said that the London Season of 1786 was one of the most unusual and spectacular gaiety that had been seen for years.

Gretna was quite prepared to believe it. The King and Queen, having more or less abdicated all the functions of the Court, spent their time in lonely isolation at Buckingham House.

Society looked therefore to the Prince of Wales to give a lead and accompanied by Mistress Fitzherbert he went from ball to masque and from Assembly to rout until Gretna’s impressions were so chaotic that she found it difficult to remember whom she had met or which person was more distinguished than the last.

The speed that she was living at made it hard for her to find time to think about herself. And yet she was unceasingly conscious of an ache somewhere in her heart that would not be assuaged.

At first, after the Marquis had left the salon with that look of disdain and coldness in his face, she was afraid of meeting him again. And then she began to be afraid that she never would meet him again for he seemed to have disappeared from the London scene.

She would find herself thinking that she saw him amongst the bright colourful crowd moving up the staircase at Carlton House or in the throng that filled the drawing room on a Sunday evening at the French Embassy and her heart would give a sudden leap and seem to turn over in her breast – only to find that she had been mistaken.

It was not the Marquis’s severe proud face that she saw and the eyes that met hers were not dark and penetrating and disdainful, but instead full of admiration.

“I am happy. I have never been happier,” Gretna told Maria and tried to convince herself that it was true.

She found it hard to talk to Sir Harry Carrington about the Marquis without revealing how interested she was. Sir Harry was always at her side now and seldom an evening passed when he did not either dine with them in St. James’s Square or accompany them to the house of some fashionable hostess.

“I asked your young man specially because he begged me to do so,” the Duchess of Rutland said with a smile when she told Gretna that Sir Harry was to take her down to supper.