“Oh, Ulric,” she had said to him the last time they were together, “why could I not have met you when I was young before I married George?”

“If you had, I doubt if I should have noticed you,” the Duke had replied. “ I find young girls a crashing bore.”

“That is not the right answer,” Aline complained. “I was not as beautiful as I am now, but still lovely enough to make George swear the moment he saw me that I should be his wife. It was the only time he has ever been positive about love.”

The Duke did not bother to argue.

He only thought, as he had dozens of times before, that he had no intention of marrying if he could possibly avoid it.

Although he was prepared to make love to another man’s wife and to make a fool of her husband, it still made him feel a little uncomfortable when she disparaged the man she had married.

He knew if that ever happened to him it was something he would never forgive and he would undoubtedly defend his honour and his family name by killing the man who had cuckolded him.

Duels were forbidden both by the Queen and by law, but those who were too chicken-hearted to meet each other at dawn in Hyde Park crossed the Channel to shoot at each other in Calais or Boulogne.

Whichever way it was done, the Duke thought it was a messy business, and the easiest way to avoid such a confrontation was not to be married.

He himself was a very good shot and extremely quick with a pistol. He knew that any husband who suspected him of seducing his wife would think twice before he challenged him.

He himself would not hesitate for one moment, but as quite certainly he would be the victor, it would be unsporting to find himself in such a position.

“I shall never marry,” he often said to his friends.

“Don’t be so ridiculous!” was the reply. “You know you have to produce an heir.”

“There is no hurry for that,” the Duke always replied.

Now at thirty-three he had still managed to remain a bachelor despite the fact that certain ambitious parents with marriageable daughters plied him with invitations.

While the girls themselves looked at him with wistful eyes, they were aware as they did so that he had no idea that they even existed.

The type of woman with whom the Duke spent his time and who captured his interest was always very sophisticated, witty and at the same time extremely feminine.

He liked women with soft voices and soft bodies.

He had never found himself interested in women with sharp tongues and perhaps because he was almost aggressively masculine himself he preferred them to be small and fragile.

“I presume it brings out the protective instinct in you,” a man had said to him once, mockingly.

The Duke had smiled cynically since he was well aware that most of the women with whom he associated did not need protecting and were, in fact, very capable of looking after themselves.