With a smile that seemed almost natural, she said now to her niece,

“I feel sure, Honora, you will want to feel that you can depend on your uncle and turn to him with all your problems.”

“I don’t – want to be a – nuisance.”

“You will not be that, my dear,” the Earl assured her genially, “and I know too how much you must miss your father. I miss him too. Everything always seemed so much more amusing when he was around.”

“He was always – laughing,” Honora said in a low voice. “I think it is his laughter I miss more than – anything else.”

The butler announced dinner and, when they were seated in the large rather pompous dining room, the Countess went out of her way to indicate to the Earl how much Honora needed his help.

She also kept asserting how important it was, being so young and inexperienced, that she should not make any mistakes.

“You know as well as I do, George,” she said, “how all those spiteful women who have tried to marry Ulric off to their unattractive daughters will be waiting to find fault with poor little Honora.”

“I am quite certain that they will find that a difficult thing to do,” the Earl said with unexpected gallantry.

“Only if you look after her and teach her so that she does not make faux pas by saying the wrong thing,” the Countess said.

She paused before she added,

“It will give me great pleasure to see their faces when I dress Honora with the good taste that most of them lack and in gowns that a great many of them cannot afford to buy.”

Her aunt spoke so spitefully that Honora wondered what the ladies to whom she was referring had done to upset her. She was not aware, of course, that she hated them because they had pursued the Duke.

It struck the Countess even as she was speaking that it would be agonising to make Honora look even lovelier than she did at the moment in gowns that only the most expensive and renowned dressmakers in Bond Street could provide.

At the same time she was aware that if she tried to make her look dowdy, which in any case would be difficult, her enemies would be sharp enough to suspect that she had a reason for it.

Although she and the Duke had been as circumspect as possible, she was not so foolish as to think that the feelings they had for each other had passed unnoticed amongst their so-called friends who watched everything they did with hawk-like eyes.

The Duke was a constant source of pleasure to them because his many love affairs gave them a great deal to chatter about.

What they did not know, they invented, while Aline was aware they hated her from the first moment she swept into the Social world to take it by storm.

She came from a family whose origins were impeccable, but which like many others had grown poorer with each generation.