The Duke smiled.

“Are you using your instinct, Honora, where I am concerned?”

“Of course,” she replied. “How could I do anything else?”

She smiled at him as she spoke and he thought that he had never known anybody so unselfconscious or who seemed to enjoy life every second she was living it.

When they had reached his hunting lodge in Leicestershire for their honeymoon, the Duke soon realised that Honora was very different from what he had expected.

He had never imagined that a woman could laugh so light-heartedly and find so many things amusing.

Honora’s was not the rather artificial laughter of the sophisticated beauties with whom he had amused himself, who always laughed as if they were trying to remember to make it sound like ‘a peal of bells’.

Instead Honora’s laughter came spontaneously and unaffectedly and she laughed with her eyes as well as with her throat.

The Duke found to his surprise that the four days they had spent together so far of their honeymoon had been for him so different from any days he could remember that he could hardly credit his own enjoyment of them.

With Honora the Duke knew that he had never laughed so much or been so amused by things that ordinarily were of no interest to him or else too trivial to evoke a discussion.

He felt as if everything she said had a new meaning and in some extraordinary way had a funny side he had never known before.

When he rose in the morning, he found himself looking forward to showing Honora another part of his estate, deciding with her which horses they should ride, and answering the hundred questions she had for him on subjects that he had never previously discussed with anyone.

What was more, he felt as if she gave him a new appreciation of the countryside.

After living in Florence for two years, to her the country was like coming home to something very dear and familiar.

“Look at the green of that field!” she would exclaim suddenly. “Could anything be more beautiful? I only wish that after all I could paint.”

“You must try to express it in music,” the Duke suggested.

“It makes me wonder if hearing is as wonderful as seeing,” she said reflectively. “If you had to make the choice, which would you choose to be – blind or deaf?”

It was the sort of question that the Duke had never been asked.

Because he was trying to keep to their pact that they should be entirely truthful with each other, he often had to hesitate and think before he gave her a reply.

Now as they rode through the gates into the garden and up towards the house Honora said,

“I think this is the happiest day I have ever known!”

There was a rapt little note in her voice, which the Duke did not miss and he replied quietly,

“I have enjoyed it too.”

They had set off quite early in the morning after breakfast to visit an outlying part of the Duke’s estate, where there was a farm he wanted to inspect.