Nancy slipped under the bedclothes. 'And no one in England knows about Wallis Simpson?'

'No one. No one common, I mean.'

'She'll be the next Queen.'

_'Pourquoi pas?_ Edward's the first British monarch to fly. Why not the first to wed a twice-divorced American? God, I'm dead beat. Quite suddenly, my inner supply of adrenalin's given out. It'll be getting light in half an hour. Just think of those poor blighters of reporters, shivering the night away inspecting the decorative ironwork of the gates at the end of the drive.'

'It wasn't Crippen who led you here, my darling,' said Nancy sleepily. 'It was accident-the next compartment to mine being empty in the wagon-lit from Basle to Calais.'

'Accident!' he exclaimed. 'I knew perfectly well at the time you'd engineered it.'

'Well! You've waited long enough to tell me.'

'No woman cares to believe that she contributed to her own seduction, no more than any child cares to stop believing in Father Christmas.' He yawned. 'This place depresses me. I've ordered the Bugatti at the door by eleven.'

2

On a May morning in 1909, two young women of surpassing beauty were travelling in a grey-upholstered first-class compartment on the express which followed the littoral from Geneva to Lausanne.

From the fertile meadows in _La Cфte,_ cows belled like circus animals looked up with tolerant curiosity. The sprouting hayfields were speckled by yellow, mauve and white flowers, the houses with top-heavy roofs clustered at every cross-roads all looked brand new. The only cloud was the belch of the engine, shredded in a breeze which broke the surface of Lake Geneva into glittering ripples decorated with white paddle-steamers and yachts. There is always winter somewhere in Switzerland, but it had lurked to its lair in the mountains.