Rupert, having come down from his second-storey bedroom early at Lucas’s request, was standing half concealed by one of the marble pillars that lined the room. Behind him on a raised dais, a string quartet was playing softly as a gentle background to the increasing flow of conversation. He watched each arrival, waiting for the moment when Hélène St Clair would enter the room with her mother and father. He had thought as the parents of the bride they might also be in the receiving line, but clearly Suzanne Barrineau, having been denied hosting the wedding breakfast, had no intention of sharing the celebration ball. Having understood this, Emile and Rosalie did not arrive promptly; rather they entered the ballroom among the last of the guests, making an entrance of which an earlier arrival would have deprived them. In their wake came their son Georges and his wife Sylvie, Rosalie’s sister and husband, and Hélène. Hélène, a girl recently freed from the schoolroom, at her first ball, her eyes glowing with excitement. She was dressed in a simple white gown, the square cut of the neck showing off her delicate shoulders to perfection. A narrow gold belt defined her slim waist, and the fullness of the skirt was gathered behind into a modest bustle. As decorum in a young girl required, the gown had little cap sleeves, and Hélène’s slender arms were encased in mid-length white gloves. Her hair had been dressed high on her head with ringlets allowed to escape about her ears to frame the oval of her face. She stood poised in the doorway, on the brink of entering adult society, waiting to be received by her hostess, and for a moment Rupert’s heart seemed to stop. She was so beautiful, but she was so young, too young by far to be interested in an old man of almost thirty. Old man of thirty! He gave a sardonic smile: this old man of thirty was behaving like a lovesick schoolboy! He feasted his eyes on her as she made her courtesies to the Barrineaux. He ached to take her in his arms, feel her heart beating in time with his own. He longed to release her beautiful dark hair from its confining pins and let it tumble about her shoulders so he could bury his face in its shining softness.

Now you really are behaving like a lovesick booby, he told himself. How was he, Rupert Chalfont, a man well practised in amorous flirtation, a connoisseur of feminine beauty while remaining carefully unentangled, how could he be struck dumb by a girl of seventeen attending her first ball?

The St Clair party moved easily into the body of the room, greeting friends and acquaintances with nods and smiles, moving to a furnished alcove between pillars on the far side. There they took their seats and watched as their eldest daughter and her new husband stepped onto the floor to open the ball.

From her place in the alcove, Hélène scanned the ballroom in search of Lucas’s English friend. Surely he must still be here. She had just seen him standing across the room and speaking with Lucie Barrineau, her heart plummeting as she did so, when Simon Barnier appeared in their alcove and made his compliments to her mother.