“My mother will, I expect, want to see you before luncheon. She does not permit visitors before twelve o’clock.”

“Thank you for telling me,” Carina replied. “I will take Dipa to her then.”

She saw his lips tighten and suddenly felt furious at what was his obvious distaste for his own child, the child he should be willing to look after and protect.

“I hope you will forgive me, my Lord,” she said, “but perhaps you did not hear me very clearly last night. I told you that Lady Lynche is dying.”

“I heard you,” he replied.

His voice was so uncompromising that Carina’s courage almost failed her and then she forced herself to say,

The woman who is looking after Lady Lynche hoped that you would visit her. And if she does die, there will be no one to see to her funeral.”

She knew as she finished speaking that she had gone too far.

Lord Lynche’s eyes were a flash of blue steel and his voice seemed almost to freeze her as he said,

“I think, Miss Warner, Lady Lynche’s affairs, or mine, are none of your business!”

Carina felt the colour come into her cheeks, but without another word she turned and walked away from him towards Dipa.

‘It is my fault,’ she told herself and yet she knew that she had been obliged to do her best for the dying woman, the mother of his child – the woman he had loved once, even if at the moment he hated her.

‘It is wrong, wrong, wrong,’ she thought, ‘that women should be the ones to suffer. He gave her the child and then was prepared to wash his hands of it.’

Now he was making the woman he had loved a matter of no concern, save that the memory of her was obviously an annoyance.

She tried to imagine their love affair – a moment of beauty and of passion, in which everything was forgotten except their love for each other.

But somehow it was difficult to visualise Lord Lynche being swept off his feet by any strong emotion. There was something so reserved and cold about him, something that made her wonder how she had dared to challenge him last night.

He had been drinking and his unsteady gait and even his wild laughter, she thought, had made him seem more human and more approachable.

This morning she might have been talking to a stone statue for all the impact she had made on him.

‘I hate him!’ she thought. ‘He is hard and cruel.’

She wondered how he could have bred anything as warm and vulnerable as little Dipa.

She knelt down beside the child and the little boy flung an arm around her neck.

“Pretty birds,” he cried, “pretty birds want more bread.”

“We will bring them some more tomorrow,” Carina promised. “Let’s go for a little walk and see what else we can find.”