Aline Hartlip sat at her dressing-table wearing a dark blue satin peignoir and polishing her nails with an ivory-backed nail buffer. She was not happy.

A tap on the door nevertheless made her heart beat distinctly faster in the expectation of its being Charles. Before she moved she looked at herself in the mirror and saw that her pale cheeks were slightly flushed and her eyes bright.

‘Bitch,’ she whispered to herself. The self-hate in the whisper was mingled with self-love. Lips parted, she rested her tongue for a moment on her lower lip and let her gaze feed on her own reflected lust; then she moved slowly over to the door, conscious of the touch of the satin on her naked body as she went, and slowly opened it.

‘Gilbert!’

‘I’m sorry, my dear, I didn’t mean to bother you. I wondered if you had any of those sachets, the ones that French doctor gave you – my head’s agony again.’

She walked – quite a different sort of walk – to her dressing-table, and found the little packet.

‘Aren’t they some terribly dangerous drug? You ought to be careful.’

‘It’s only laudanum or something isn’t it, opium, chloroform, I don’t know. They didn’t do you any harm. I must have something.’

‘Poor thing, I’m sorry. I didn’t know the men had come up. Weren’t you going to smoke a cigar?’

‘I didn’t feel like it with this head.’

‘Wasn’t the blotting-paper any good?’

He sighed. The blotting-paper had been suggested to him by his German brother-in-law on whose estates in Silesia he had been shooting earlier in the season; it was supposed that chewing blotting-paper until it became a sort of paste and then inserting it between the front teeth and the upper lip prevented the vibration of the skull which caused shooting headaches. Gilbert had not found the method effective.

‘Perhaps German blotting-paper is different,’ Aline suggested. ‘Did you try it while we were there?’

‘No. He didn’t tell me about it until the last day.’

‘That must be it then. I’ll write to Maud and get her to send me some German blotting-paper.’

‘That’s nice of you. It might do the trick.’

He lingered, flexing his fingers.

‘I could stay a bit if you liked.’

‘My dear, it’s not one of our weeks. Besides you need rest if you’re to do yourself justice tomorrow. It’s no use letting people think Lionel Stephens is a better shot than you. You know how people love to talk. You don’t want that sort of thing going around, do you?’

‘What do you mean? Is that what people are saying?’

‘I don’t know that they’re saying it exactly. Don’t look so shocked. You know you’ve been thinking about it.’

‘Nonsense. What did they say? Tell me what anyone has said.’

‘No one has said anything. Please don’t yap at me Gilbert.’

‘I am not yapping. Someone must have said something, otherwise you wouldn’t have thought of it.’

‘Yes I would. I thought of it. Why not?’