“How beautiful!” she said, almost beneath her breath.

Lord Lynche opened the door of a room and led the way into the salon. It had long French windows overlooking the garden and Park and the ceiling was of raised plasterwork. The fireplace was of a delicately veined Italian marble.

Carina thought that here was a room that any woman would love to sit in. Then, with a start, she remembered her duties and looked round for Dipa.

He had disappeared, but they could hear his voice, high and excited in the distance as he romped through the empty house.

“Leave him,” Lord Lynche said. “He can come to no harm.”

They walked across the room to stand in front of a mirror carved with cupids and surmounted by a crown, which Carina knew must have been made in the days of King Charles II.

“It’s all so enchanting!” she exclaimed. “If I were you, I should want to live here – not in The Castle.”

“Do you suppose I don’t want that?” Lord Lynche asked roughly. “I have told you that it was mine, but now – now I don’t know who it belongs to.”

He was suffering so acutely that Carina could not but feel sorry for him.

“Won’t you tell me about it?” she asked quietly but a little timidly, wondering if she was risking yet another rebuke.

“There is little to tell,” he answered, “save that I was drunk and mad to stake The Castle and its grounds on the turn of a card.”

“And you lost?” Carina said.

“I lost,” he echoed. “It seems incredible now that I should have been such a fool and yet at the time it appeared almost a certainty that I would be the winner.”

“And what were the stakes?” Carina asked.

“A hundred thousand pounds, his horses, they are the winning stud at Newmarket, and one or two other things, I forget what. It was not that I wanted anything that he offered, but because he forced me into it and got me into a corner where I would have seemed yellow-hearted and a coward had I backed out at the last moment.”

“It sounds the sort of way that Sir Percy would behave,” Carina remarked.

“Nevertheless, I should have been man enough to refuse him.”

Lord Lynche walked up and down the soft carpet, his hands clenched until the knuckles showed white.

“I was drunk, I tell you. I had been drinking all the evening, but I was not so drunk as not to realise what Percy was doing. He was pushing me, laughing at me, making the others back him up until it was just a duel between the two of us. My God, why did I let him do it?”

Lord Lynche walked across to the window and leaned against it, his head on his arm in a gesture of utter despair.