“If you talk to your future relatives in such a way,” the Earl answered, “I am sure they will be scandalised!”

“I am trying to appear brave,” Honora confessed, “but I really am very afraid.”

“Just stay close to me and leave the Duke’s relatives to your aunt. She is much more capable of coping with them than you and I are.”

When the Earl spoke to her like that, Honora thought, it was almost like having her father with her again.

Therefore, when she went into the drawing room, she was smiling and many of the people there thought she looked like a breath of spring.

Again there were a great many congratulations and good wishes to listen to, again there were toasts and another speech from the Duke.

When dinner was over, most of the guests sat down at the card tables and just as Honora thought that the Duke was coming across the room to speak to her, her aunt said,

“I presume you can play the piano?”

“Yes, Aunt Aline.”

“Then go and play it, but softly, so that it will not disturb those playing bridge. It will give you something to do.”

Obediently Honora went to the large piano that stood in an alcove of the room where they had gathered after dinner.

It was not the magnificent drawing room where they had first assembled, but a room adjoining it, which, Honora was to learn later, was always used when the guests wished to play cards.

There were some very fine pictures around the walls which she told herself she would look at later and, as she sat down on the piano stool, she noticed that the Duke and her aunt were the only two people in the party who were not occupied.

They were talking intimately together and she only hoped they were not talking about her or that she had done something wrong.

Then, as she started to play, she forgot everything but her enjoyment of the music.

No one had been interested that she had won the music prize at the school each year that she had been there.

Because she was such a good musician the Mother Superior had insisted on her having extra music lessons rather than waste her time drawing and painting at which she was not very proficient.

To Honora it was a joy and delight to be able to play music, which to her Italian teacher was more important in life than eating and drinking.

“Music must not only lift your heart,” he said, “but the hearts of all who listen to you. Therefore don’t play with your fingers but with your soul!”

Because he spoke so eloquently and Honora understood what he was trying to say, she tried to express her thoughts and her feelings in music and the last six months before she left Florence had begun to compose.

She was far too afraid of being laughed at by the other girls to tell them what she was doing, but she had played one melody to her teacher, who had listened to it intently and said,