“Please tell me – tell me – that you – love me.”

The Duke kissed her until a little while later he pulled her to her feet saying,

“Shall we go upstairs, my adorable one?”

He felt her draw in her breath and he said quickly,

“I promise I will not do anything you do not wish me to do, but, darling, though kissing you is very very wonderful, it is only the beginning of love and I have so much more to teach you.”

She hid her face against his neck before she said in a voice he could hardly hear,

“I – want you to – teach me – I want you – now that you love me – to give me a – baby.”

“There is no hurry,” the Duke smiled. “At the same time, my adorable little wife, I think if we do have one and it is born of our love, it will be very beautiful.”

“Very – very beautiful!” Honora agreed, “because everything I am – feeling and I know you are feeling too, is so – exquisite and so – glorious that it could only have come – from – God.”

As the Duke felt there was nothing he could say in words, he said it in kisses. Equally he knew what she had said was true.

In the past there had always been a fiery desire leaping into flame between himself and a woman.

Yet vaguely, although he had not put it into words, at the back of his mind he had known it was not real love – the love the poets wrote about, the musicians composed for or the artists painted.

Now, as if for the first time, he understood all those things. He had found them, although it seemed incredible, in one small person who was still a child as yet unawakened to womanhood.

He knew as he kissed Honora that to awaken her from a bud into the full bloom of a flower would be the most exciting as well as the most marvellous thing he had ever done.

She was, he thought, what every man sought and longed for, a woman who was his own, untouched and unspoilt, not only by other men but also by women.

She was his and it was like having a perfectly clean sheet of paper in front of him on which he could write.

He thought what he wrote would be his contribution to life, which could be good or bad, according to the way he wrote.

The importance of his task made him for the moment feel apprehensive.

It flashed through his mind that he was ashamed of his past and the many things he had done which now seemed tawdry, second-rate and unworthy of his own ideals.

Then he knew that just as he must make the future perfect for Honora, the past must not reach out to affect her in any way.

As he kissed her, he prayed, as he had not prayed for many years, that he would not fail her.