The crunch came for Rose when she attended the opera with her parents and Daisy. Her parents only attended the opera because it was the thing to do and both were apt to fall asleep when the first note of the overture sounded.

Looking across at the other boxes, Rose suddenly stiffened with shock. Harry had just entered a box opposite with Dolores. She was wearing a golden silk gown with a heavy diamond-and-ruby necklace. A diamond tiara flashed on her blonde hair. Rose wondered bitterly which ladies of Paris had found their jewels missing after their doting husbands had given them to Dolores.

Her heart sank even further when her father suddenly exclaimed, ‘There’s Cathcart in the box opposite with that French tart!’

The countess fumbled for her opera glasses, raised them to her eyes and hissed, ‘Disgraceful. Rose, he will be summoned and you will break off your ridiculous engagement. Peggy Struthers is going to India with her gel. I’ll ask her to chaperone you.’

‘I do not want to go to India!’

‘You will do as you’re told.’

Rose could not pay attention to the opera. Dolores was flirting boldly and Harry seemed to be enjoying every moment of it.

At the interval, when everyone mingled in the crush bar, Lord Hadshire approached Harry, drew him aside and muttered, ‘Your presence is requested tomorrow at eleven o’clock. No, don’t say a word.’

Dolores had left Harry’s side to speak to some men. Rose followed her and as she turned away to rejoin Harry, Rose said loudly and clearly, ‘Leave my fiancé alone, you bitch, or I’ll kill you!’

There was a sudden shocked silence.

‘That’s it!’ said Lady Polly furiously, joining her daughter. ‘We’re going home.’

Rose barely slept that night. She tossed and turned, wondering all the while how she could stop her parents from sending her to India. Parents of failed debutantes always hoped that their hitherto unmarriageable daughters would become marriageable when out in India and surrounded by lonely men far from home.

At last, Rose decided boldness was the only answer. The only record of Dolores she had been able to find in the office was her address in Cromwell Gardens in Kensington.

She would go there in the morning and confront Dolores and find out what was going on.

Daisy was alarmed when she heard Rose’s plan the next morning. ‘Don’t come with me,’ said Rose. ‘Go to the office, and, if the captain asks, say I am unwell.’

Not wanting to occasion comment by taking one of her father’s carriages, Rose hailed a hack and directed the driver to Kensington.

She paid off the hack in Cromwell Gardens and stood looking up at the house. Could Dolores really afford a whole house? But on approaching the door, she found it had been divided up into four flats, and Dolores’s name was on a card indicating that she lived in a house made up of two flats, one on the ground floor and one above.