Her fingers were icy cold. As he pulled her gently from the balustrade, she released her hold on the stone urn to jump down onto the gravel path beside him.

She was not tall and her hair, which was frizzed and curled, made her tiny heart-shaped face seem almost too small for a very large pair of worried eyes.

She looked up.

“Let me – go,” she pleaded.

He knew that she was not speaking about the fact that he was still holding one of her hands.

“When you have told me what it is all about.”

The gentleman was tall with a slim athletic grace and there was something purposeful about him, which told the girl that it would be useless to run away.

Somehow, now that he had prevented her from doing what she had intended to do, she felt curiously weak as if her mind was no longer working properly.

The music in the distance suddenly seemed louder and she glanced nervously over her shoulder as she muttered

“They may – come and – look for – me.”

“Then I will take you to a place where they, whoever they might be, will not discover us,” the gentleman replied.

He turned as he spoke and, taking the girl by the arm, passed through some shrubs to where on the edge of the river, there was a small arbour.

It was surrounded by syringa and lilac trees in blossom, which hid it from the rest of the garden.

It had clearly been intended as a sitting-out place for the guests at the ball, because attached to a tree that overhung the hidden place was a Chinese lantern.

A lighted candle inside it threw a golden glow over the shrubs and was reflected fitfully in the swiftly moving darkness of the river that lay below the balustrade.

There were soft cushions arranged on the seat inside the arbour and the gentleman waited for the girl to seat herself before he too sat down.

As he did so, the light shone on his face and she cried almost involuntarily,

“Oh, you are the famous dandy!”

There was a faint smile on his lips as he replied,

“I am honoured that you should know me.”

“I apologise – I should not have said that,” she answered. “But I saw you in Hyde Park driving the most magnificent pair of chestnuts – and I asked who you were.”

She remembered, as she spoke, her mother’s scornful laugh.

“That is Lord Dorrington,” she had said in a voice that expressed all too clearly her dislike, “a lazy good-for-nothing dandy! And I can assure you that looking in his direction will do you no good! He is a vowed bachelor, a fop who thinks about nothing but his appearance and spends a fortune on his clothes.”

He could, however, as the girl saw, drive with an expertise that was unmistakable and she wondered what Lord Dorrington had done to incur her mother’s wrath.