Lord Henfield sat very still for several minutes, the letter on his knee before him. She thought him ‘immune’, did she? The implication was that she would not wish it otherwise. If only she knew, if only he had been honest with himself, let alone with her. He had suppressed his feelings, for honourable enough reasons, but they had not dwindled, but rather burgeoned once she had left home, and he was no longer struggling to hide them. Perhaps, if he had revealed them to her, she would have recoiled, ‘run away’ to her London Season to find a worthier lover. He recalled Netheravon, dimly, as a fair youth, a year his junior, but Lord Martley was unknown to him, and if the appalling poet was not ‘serious’, then who was? He wondered, with disquiet, what information Sir John had received, and resolved to visit his godfather upon the morrow.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘I have had another letter from Henrietta. In view of the social vortex in which she appears to find herself the centre, I am remarkably touched that she is so good a correspondent.’ Sir John smiled. ‘I fear my responses must seem dull in comparison.’

‘I had a letter also. She is certainly having a good time.’ Charles sighed, looking glum, at which Sir John raised an eyebrow, and spoke his mind.

‘Tell me, Charles, why on earth did you let Henrietta go to London without saying anything?’

‘Sir?’

‘You have been moping about here like a spaniel whose master has gone away. If you love the girl, why did you do nothing? Why are you still here?’

‘But one simply cannot love a girl one has known from an infant … like a sister. It is not right … I mean …’

‘You did not love her “as an infant”. As I recall, you frequently thought her very silly, and a perfect nuisance, and, I might add, you were a stripling. A few years makes a huge difference when very young, and a lad of fourteen would look down upon a little girl of five as an encumbrance that might sometimes be tolerated. Well, now you are a man grown, and Henrietta is not a child, except perhaps to me, and to a father a daughter will always be “their child”.’

‘It would horrify her to know my feelings for her. I will be eight and twenty next birthday. I am too old, and she thinks of me as she would her older brother,’ declared Charles gloomily.