Carina gave up the struggle and, having opened the window and pulled the curtains, she left him, knowing that because he was tired he would fall asleep almost immediately.

‘How am I ever going to teach him all the things that other boys of his age know already?’ she wondered now.

‘I am a bad Governess,’ she told herself severely and had thought somewhat guiltily that she should be sewing instead of sitting with idle hands.

But, after starting to look for some clothes to mend, she realised then how unaccountably exhausted she was. It was with a sense of relief she remembered that she did not have to change into a smart dress and go down to dinner.

‘Whatever could have put the idea into Lord Lynche’s head?’ she pondered.

He certainly did not seem the type of person who would consider the feelings of an insignificant Governess!

‘It must be another trick of Sir Percy’s,’ she thought.

She rubbed her lips with her handkerchief. They were still bruised and tender from his brutality and she remembered with a kind of horror the touch of his hands and the things he had said to her.

She wondered what would have happened if she had not felt so faint that it was obvious even to someone of his lack of sensibility.

And then, resolutely, because her thoughts troubled her, she rose from the chair and went to stand at the open window gazing out over the Park.

So much had happened – and yet she had an unaccountable feeling that all these fantastic and in some ways crazy things were only the prelude to something even more frightening that was waiting round the corner.

‘I am imagining it,’ she thought.

But she knew that some fundamental instinct was warning her and setting her on her guard.

She looked out into the shadows of the great trees that had stood there for so long.

Perhaps it was her mother’s voice that was guiding and helping her through the terrible pitfalls that seemed to lie in wait.

She felt then her whole being go out in a wordless prayer of concentration to her mother to help and protect her.

“Oh, Mummy, Mummy,” she whispered and felt the tears prick her eyes because she was so alone and because there was no one she could turn to for advice.

How long she stood there she did not know. She was aware only that the stars had begun to come out in the darkening sky and it was no longer possible to discern anything in the garden below or beneath the trees.

She turned back to the brightness of the room somehow feeling that, whatever happened, she would not be lost or entirely abandoned.

“Mummy, Mummy,” she whispered to herself, as if the word were some kind of talisman.

She saw that, while she had been standing with her back to the room, her supper had been brought upstairs.