‘She’s coming for that then?’

‘She and Ida are coming. It’s only a little way from the road.’

‘Then if you other ladies can stand the pace we shall have all of you as audience. We shall really have to do our best, shan’t we?’

‘Gilbert always does his best.’

‘Of course. That’s why he’s the great expert he is.’

‘I think always doing one’s best is a bore.’

‘I have never seen you do less than your best at your particular art.’

‘My art?’

‘The art of looking beautiful.’

‘Oh that. That’s a bore. And yet I suppose if one has acquired some sort of reputation – though goodness knows why, in my case – one feels one has to keep it up. It’s all pride.’

‘Quite.’

‘And the spirit of competition. Are we proud and competitive, would you say?’

‘Probably. Like racehorses. That’s why I enjoy racing so much.’

‘They’re also a little mad, racehorses, I often think. If you look at their eyes when they’re walking round the paddock there seems to be madness in them.’

‘They’re very highly bred. Proud, competitive and mad, those are aristocratic attributes.’

‘Oh we’re certainly aristocratic,’ said Aline gaily.

Sir Reuben smiled, enjoying the joke in anticipation with Minnie, who had once told him that Gilbert Hartlip had married Aline in order to ‘dorer le blazon’. Her father was a Scottish industrialist, still living and in the meantime not sufficiently dazzled by his daughter’s elevation to have been more than really rather mean with the marriage settlement.

But he had underestimated her.

She suddenly laughed and putting her arm though his said, ‘Of course the truth is I’m no more of an aristocrat than you are.’

Lionel Stephens was to stand at the end of the line, in the Park just beyond the corner of the wood. Nodding in a friendly manner to Gilbert Hartlip who was to stand nearest to him on the ride and whose preoccupied air he failed to notice, he walked on slowly with Olivia. There was no hurry because the beaters could not be expected yet to have reached their starting point. He preceded Olivia over the stile so as to be able to turn back to help her. Glancing behind her along the ride he saw Gilbert deep in conversation with his loaders. Instead of merely holding out an arm, he put both hands on her waist as if to help her jump down from the stile. She hesitated.

‘You were going to tell me something,’ he said looking up at her. ‘You said, as if…’

‘As if what?’

‘You didn’t finish. I said we’d known each other before and you said it was as if…’

‘Oh,’ she said, smiling and hopping neatly down from the stile. ‘As if…’ He had not stepped backwards and still held his hands on her waist so that they were very close. She looked up into his face with an expression of unabashed and affectionate friendliness. ‘As if you were my long-lost brother.’