“You are so lovely,” he murmured, “lovelier than I remembered.”

She felt herself begin to tremble.

She knew that his eyes were on her lips and thought that he was about to kiss her, drawing in her breath in anticipation of the rapture that in one second would be hers.

But to her surprise he turned away from her.

“Carina,” he said. “I have something to ask you.”

“What is it?” she whispered.

She had to force herself to speak because the sudden constriction in her throat nearly suffocated her.

“I want to ask you to marry me – ”

Then, as she felt as if the room swam round her, he went on,

“ – but before I tell you what you mean to me and what I know my life would be without you, I must tell you something else.”

Carina pressed her fingers against her breasts. Somehow she could not trust herself to speak.

“It is this,” Lord Lynche said and unexpectedly his voice was hard, “that if you marry me, if you take me as I am, then you are accepting a man who loves you with the whole of his being, but who has nothing else to give you.”

“What do you mean?” Carina asked, bewildered.

“I mean this – and therefore take your time before you give me your answer,” Lord Lynche replied. “I have nothing to lay at your feet except my heart. I am penniless, absolutely penniless.”

“But – I don’t understand,” Carina faltered.

For just one moment his lips twisted in a grim smile.

“Why should you?” he asked. “But what I am telling you is the truth. Come here.”

Carina moved slowly across the floor towards him almost as if she was mesmerised.

When she reached his side, he drew her to the window and they stood looking out over the Vale of Evesham towards the blue silhouette of the Malvern Hills against the evening sky.

“You see that?” he asked.

“Yes,” Carina answered, wonderingly.

“Once I believed that the land as far as the eye can see would belong to me, would be mine to administer, to love and to care for as my ancestors have done since the time of the Norman Conquest,” Lord Lynche went on. “But now it is no longer mine. And, although this house belongs to me, as I told you yesterday, now that The Castle has gone, it must be the family seat, the focal point from which the Lynche family carries on its name.”

“But what are you saying?” Carina cried. “I thought Sir Percy – ”

Lord Lynche shook his head and interrupted her.

“It has nothing to do with Percy Rockley,” he said. “He is finished and forgotten. No, all this, Carina darling, must belong to the Head of the Family and there is nothing I can do except to give my house to him for his children in the future.”

“But you are Lord Lynche,” Carina said insistently.

He shook his head.