'You'll give my love to Fennia and Astra,' he beamed, and as Yancie promised she would she was bracing herself to walk through the restaurant where he was dining. Should she give him a smile or, following his example, do a bit of looking straight through him?

It irritated her that this man should do this to her confidence and make her so that she had to think how to act rather than follow her natural instincts. However, the situation of whether to smile or whether to look straight through Thomson Wakefield didn't arrive because, when she took a glance over to where he had been sitting, she saw that he wasn't there. His party had gone.

She and Charlie hugged and kissed farewell in a friendly fashion, knowing, without pain, that it could be another twelve months before they saw each other again, and Yancie began her journey back to the hotel.

She'd had an extremely pleasant evening with Charlie Merrett, but it was not thoughts of Charlie that occupied her on that drive-but Thomson Wakefield. Had he gone back to the hotel-had he gone on somewhere?

Gone on somewhere, she decided. Grief, it was only a little after half past ten. On a Saturday night, too! Of course, his dinner had been of the business variety, but corporate entertaining-she was sure she'd heard that phrase somewhere didn't end when the clock struck ten; she, without the smallest experience of `corporate entertaining', felt she could be positive about that. But, in any case, she suddenly felt she could be equally positive that if Thomson Wakefield had decided to return to the hotel and, on his way out, had spotted the company Jaguar, then she wouldn't at all have put it past him to have come back in and ordered her to drive him back to the hotel. And she, eager as she was to keep this job, would have had to comply.