The Countess drew in her breath.

“The Queen has decided that you shall marry the Princess Sophie of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha!”

As she spoke, the Duke stiffened.

Then he stared at her as if he thought that he could not have heard her aright.

“What are you saying? How do you know this?” he asked at length.

“The Prince told George yesterday morning and, of course, he has arranged it as she is his cousin.”

“Are you absolutely sure that is what he said?”

“You know George never exaggerates and naturally he was delighted. As I have told you before, he suspects that we are seeing too much of each other.”

The Duke rose to his feet to stand holding onto the mantelpiece and looking down at the fire.

He was not seeing the flames flickering over the coals, but the fat plain face of Princess Sophie whom he had met a month ago at Buckingham Palace.

She had come to England at the invitation of the Prince and the Queen, to please her adored Albert, had made a great fuss of her.

The Duke had actually met the Princess on several occasions and had thought her a typically dull dowdy German Fraulein, who would grow even duller and uglier when she became a German Frau.

She was already too fat and too red-faced and her clothes accentuated all the worst points of her body just as the way she did her hair brought out the worst features of her face.

He could imagine no worse fate than being married to the Princess and since German families, especially the Saxe-Coburgs, clung to each other like leeches, he would be permanently entertaining her even duller and uglier relations.

He was silent for so long that at last Aline asked in little above a whisper,

“What are you going to do?”

The Duke turned round.

“That is just what I am wondering. What the hell can I do except refuse point-blank to contemplate such a life of unmitigated hell?”

“I guessed that was how you would feel! Oh, Ulric, it is terrifying for you, but somehow you must be clever about it.”

She was silent for a moment before she added,

“That was why I thought you had to know at once before the Prince or the Queen tell you what they have in mind.”

“What has happened so far?” the Duke asked. “How far has this absurd idea progressed?”

“I think from what George told me,” the Countess replied, “that after they had stayed here the Princess, or perhaps it was her father, wrote to Prince Albert and said how happy they had been in England. They also insinuated that the Princess would like to marry an Englishman.”

She looked up at the Duke’s scowling face apprehensively before she added,

“George thought that Prince Albert had said she had actually named you as the type of Englishman to whom she would like to be married.”

“She may want to marry me,” the Duke exclaimed furiously, “but I am damned if I will marry her!”