He was smoking a cigar and, as she entered the room, he took it from his mouth, holding it between his fingers so that the smoke from it rose towards his face as if it was incense before some heathen God.

“So your clothes have arrived!”

He spoke abruptly in English and, because they were not the words she expected him to say, she started a little nervously.

“I would like an explanation,” she began only to be interrupted.

“That can wait,” he said. “At the moment there is another matter – the way you are dressed! A very unattractive get-up and decidedly masculine! I think you have forgotten that the reason I brought you here is because you are a woman. I have a fancy to see you in evening dress. Dinner will wait while you change.”

The colour came flooding in a crimson tide into Skye’s pale cheeks.

“How dare you!”

He raised his eyebrows at that.

“Surely that is an old-fashioned retort?”

“I refuse to change. Do you hear me?” Skye snapped. “I refuse.”

He looked down at his cigar and for a moment there was a faint smile on his lips.

“Must I play lady’s maid?” he enquired.

There was no mistaking the threat underlying the quietness of his words, for he raised his eyes as he spoke and Skye saw the determination in them.

For a moment she defied him, her chin high, her breath coming quickly and then with a little sound that was neither a sob nor a groan, she fled behind the curtain that screened her bedroom.

The Indian girl was not there to help her. Hurriedly and in a fever lest he should follow her and put his threat into operation, she dragged off the jacket and trousers, flung off the walking shoes and heavy silk stockings and took from behind the blue hangings the first dress her hand encountered.

It was only when she had put it on and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she bent down to fasten her evening sandals that she realised she was wearing a ball gown. A frock of pale green tulle, embroidered with diamanté, it had a great cluster of coral-coloured flowers trailing over one shoulder and down the side of the skirt.

It was a dress she had only worn once before at a ball in New York and now she wondered if anything could be more incongruous than its billowing sparkling skirts in a cave fashioned by Incas and inhabited by a modern bandit.

She tidied her hair, had a glimpse of her white face, her eyes wide and frightened. Then she turned from the mirror towards the outer cave.

As she came in, he was still standing where she had left him. His cigar was finished, but now he held a glass in his hand. He looked at her for a moment without speaking.