She learnt that, when Lord Dorrington inherited the house and the estate on his father’s death, he had found much of the furniture and pictures were greatly in need of repair.

“My father was a sportsman,” he explained. “To him horses meant more than anything else. He was someone I greatly admired, but it was from my mother that I inherited a love of antiques and the need of books.”

He showed Alyna the inlaid furniture he had bought in France after the Revolution, the pictures he had purchased in Italy and the gold ornaments, the glass and enamels that he had bought in Venice.

Each piece had its own history and everything, Alyna noticed, seemed to have a special meaning for its owner. His strong well-shaped fingers almost caressed each possession as he picked it up.

The pictures particularly were a delight. Some were very old and Lord Dorrington told her how he had discovered them black with age in strange and unexpected places.

“How could they be restored so well to their original beauty?” Alyna asked.

“It’s a very difficult and delicate operation,” he replied. “The dirt must be lifted from the picture so gently and carefully that it does not damage the original painting or destroy the true colour.”

He glanced at her hair as he spoke and she thought that she had been like one of the pictures he had restored.

“How do you know when you see anything in such a dilapidated condition that there is anything of value underneath?” she asked.

“It is a question I myself asked His Royal Highness only the other day,” Lord Dorrington answered.

“And what did he reply?”

“He said he had an awareness, an instinct that was seldom wrong!”

“And you – what do you feel?”

Lord Dorrington thought for a few seconds.

“I feel an excitement, a kind of tingling not unlike the rising of desire. And I am never mistaken!”

There was silence then he began to speak of a Titian that depicted a woman with hair almost the colour of her own.

Finally in a smaller room, where he said he often sat when he was alone, there was a copy of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.

“I had this painted when I was in Florence,” he said. “It’s the only copy of a painting in the whole house. But I wanted this particular picture.”

Alyna stood looking at it for some moments. It was hard for her to see herself in the naked figure of the Goddess rising from the waves in a gleaming shell. And yet there was no doubt that her hair was the same colour and perhaps there was some resemblance to Simonetta’s oval forehead and her small pointed chin.

“I only wish I was as beautiful as that,” she said at length almost to herself rather than to Lord Dorrington.