“No,” he answered gently, as one might speak to a child. “Now that my brother is dead, the title is inherited by his son – Dipa.”

Carina gave a little exclamation.

“Dipa?” she repeated incredulously.

Lord Lynche moved away as if he could not bear to be so close to her.

“Perhaps I had better start at the beginning,” he said. “It is a story that you are entitled to hear. Will you sit down?”

Because she was afraid that her legs would no longer carry her, Carina seated herself on the brocade-covered sofa by the fireplace.

Her eyes were very dark in her white face.

She raised them towards Lord Lynche as he stood looking down at her, his arm on the marble mantelpiece.

“My brother Giles was ten years older than I,” he began. “He was always a gay dog and had little use for living in the country and trying to look after the estate. But my mother adored him. He had always been her favourite and she would hear no ill of him and if she did she would not believe it, not even when he killed a man.”

“Killed?”

“‘Murdered’ is a better word,” Lord Lynche replied. “He was only a shopkeeper, but he had a very pretty wife. The husband returned home unexpectedly and my brother shot him dead without there being the slightest excuse of self-defence.”

“How horrible!” Carina exclaimed.

“It was indeed a crime for which there was no justification,” Lord Lynche agreed. “But owing to my mother’s influence with the Home Secretary, the whole matter was hushed up and not a breath of scandal reached the newspapers,”

Lord Lynche paused a moment and looked down at the flames.

“I think,” he added in a low voice, “that from that moment on she was unbalanced, almost, if one is frank, a little mad,”

“She was wonderful all the same,” Carina said.

“Yes, indeed,” he answered. “But her whole life was centred on one issue – to save my brother from the consequences of his crime,”

“Perhaps every mother would have felt the same,” Carina suggested.

“Perhaps,” Lord Lynche agreed. “Anyway, with her genius for organisation, she had him smuggled abroad and contrived that, although a warrant had been issued for his arrest, it would never be put into operation unless he returned to this country.”

“She was not able to see him,” Carina said, her heart aching a little for the woman who loved her son, but who had been forced to send him into exile.

“There was nothing else she could do,” Lord Lynche replied, “if she was to save him from being hanged. My brother always had a hasty temper and there were innumerable stories, all of which would have come out at a trial, of his injuring people who annoyed him. No, my mother did the only thing she could do at the time,”

“What happened then?” Carina asked.