“Lord Stratford and a great number of other people would be amused to learn that it has caught up with me at last!”

“You were so sure of yourself – so confident – that you could remain – aloof and indifferent?” Yamina asked.

“I did not know that you were waiting for me,” Lord Castleford replied.

He looked at her as she sat opposite him and added,

“If I could have looked into a crystal ball and seen us at this moment I suppose every instinct nurtured by my education and upbringing would have made me run away as hard as I could in the opposite direction.”

He saw the sudden pain in her eyes and continued quickly,

“You know that is not true! Do you think for one moment that I would willingly have missed what I am feeling now or what I felt last night?”

“What did you do – after you left me?” Yamina enquired.

“I walked around the deck,” Lord Castleford said, “telling myself that what I felt for you was just passion, a physical desire because you are so beautiful.”

“And – then?” Yamina prompted as he stopped speaking.

“Then I knew it was something very different,” Lord Castleford said. “I knew you were mine, completely and absolutely mine, that no words or arguments can alter the fact that we belong to each other and there is not only a physical bond between us but also a spiritual one.”

“Do you really – mean that?” Yamina asked.

“I mean it!” Lord Castleford said, “and that is why, my darling, I know now that I cannot live without you.”

Yamina rose from the chair to look once again out through the porthole.

“It is no use talking like that,” she said. “What do we know about each other? As you say, this may be just something physical – something, I understand, which happens between a man and a woman like a fire that is suddenly ignited, but which can die down just as quickly.”

“Is that what you feel about me?”

He had not moved, and yet she felt that he was standing very close to her.

“Women are – perhaps – different,” she said hesitantly.

“I am not asking you about women,” he said. “I am asking about you! Do you feel this is something that has burst into life and which once we separate will no longer trouble either of us?”

Yamina did not answer and after a moment he went on,

“That is what I have felt where other women were concerned. I wanted them, desired them, but once I had made them mine they were no longer of any particular importance. Sometimes our liaison, if that is the right word for it, continued, sometimes it died away the moment we were both satisfied.”

There was something scathing in his voice and, as Yamina still did not speak, he said,

“Are you telling me that that is what you are feeling now?”