She closed her eyes for a moment and remembered the tone in his voice when he said that he loved her. And then, with a little helpless dropping of her spirits, she recalled how he had said that he could never ask her to marry him.

“Why? Why? Why?” she asked herself aloud.

She was sure that it was something to do with the man with white hair hidden below in the Priest’s hole. And yet that too seemed impossible. How could he, concealed and inactive, affect Lord Lynche’s life and hers?

Carina slipped out of bed and went to the window.

It was a dull cold day with a promise of rain in the heavy dark clouds. The leaves were falling from the trees in the Park. She knew that summer was over and winter was already beginning to creep upon them.

She wondered what would happen before Christmas came. At least they would all be here and nowhere else thanks to Colonel Wakeford’s having found out by what methods Sir Percy had such an apparently phenomenal run of luck.

It was incredible, Carina thought, that he had managed to hoodwink people for so long. And yet, who would suspect a member of the aristocracy, a man obviously as wealthy as Sir Percy?

‘It must have been an obsession with him,’ she murmured, remembering how her father had told her once that there were men who could not bear to lose, whose characters were so warped that any setback drove them to the point of madness.

Carina put her hands up to her eyes as if to wipe away not only the memory of the gambler, but the memory of her father.

He need not have died. He might be alive now –

But then she would never have met Lord Lynche, never have known what it was to love so that her whole body beat in rhythm with the ecstasy in her heart.

“I love him, I love him,” she said aloud and then blushed at the sound of her own voice.

She dressed quickly, for it was cold in her bedroom, and then went to Dipa’s room expecting to find him as usual playing with his toys.

But this morning there was only a hump in the bed and she had to peer under the bedclothes to find him curled up like a small rabbit in a burrow at the very foot of it.

“What are you doing, Dipa?” she asked.

“It’s cold,” Dipa answered. “Cold. No sun.”

“You will soon get warm if you run about,” Carina told him. “Come and dress by the fire. It is lit in the nursery. And after breakfast we will go for a walk.”

“No, no,” Dipa cried. “Cold, cold!”

And he burst into a flood of protest in his own tongue.