The Prince of Wales walked round Lord Dorrington looking at his coat from every angle.

“When I think,” he muttered to himself, “that I spend a fortune on my clothes and they never fit as well or have the appearance of yours. It’s enough to drive a man into a decline!”

There was a faint smile at the corner of Lord Dorrington’s lips. It was, of course, impossible to tell the Prince of Wales that, as he indulged himself too freely and took too little exercise, he was at the age of thirty-six extremely fat.

‘He must be getting on for twenty stone,’ Lord Dorrington said to himself.

Aloud he remarked,

“We all agree, Sire, that you are an impressive figure whatever your attire.”

The Prince of Wales threw himself back into a chair pouting rather like a child who has been deprived of a present he had been promised.

As if he wished to change the subject from one that obviously distressed the Prince of Wales, Lord Yarmouth said,

“Now that Dorrington is here, Sire, will you not tell him why we were awaiting his arrival with so much anxiety?”

“Yes! Yes of course!” the Prince of Wales agreed, forgetting his pique over the coat and in his customary fashion being easily diverted from one interest to another.

“You were waiting for me?” Lord Dorrington asked.

He accepted a glass of wine from a silver tray proffered him by a powdered footman and then sat himself, as obviously he was expected to do, on a chair at the Prince of Wales’s right.

The men sitting on the gold-framed chairs covered in yellow Chinese silk were all close friends of the Heir to the Throne.

There was Lord Worcester – gay, inconsequential but very popular and the Duke of Rutland, more serious and an excellent judge of horseflesh.

And Lord Alvanley, amusing, witty and without whom no party was complete, was well educated and could speak French without a trace of a British accent. He had brains and was a first class sportsman.

Lord Yarmouth, the fourth son of the Marquis of Hertford, had as keen a taste for furniture and pictures as the Prince of Wales himself.

“There is no foisting of sham Van Dycks or copies of Reubens on Lord Yarmouth,” a well-known hostess had said to Lord Dorrington the previous week and she had added spitefully, “such as I believe has been done on the Duke of Devonshire.”

Lord Dorrington looked from one to the other and then with a faint smile said,

“What is the problem? I appear to be beset by problems this evening.”

In answer the Prince of Wales picked up a picture from beside his chair and held it out dramatically.

“Look at this!” he said.

It was not a very large picture and it had no frame. It appeared to be black with age and had obviously been treated roughly with the passing of time.