'Yes, you should', Letitia reproved softly. Her bottom cheeks quivered as he moved his hands down to palm them. For a moment her flushed cheek brushed in silent pleading against his own, but he pushed her gently away.-'You will come to me afterwards, Easton?' she asked.

'We shall see. Go now and receive that which is due to you'.

As Letitia made her exit with just the degree of doubtfulness in her posture which she evidently felt was appropriate to the occasion, Easton rubbed his hands and straightened his purple waistcoat. The girl, Kate, had been a superb find-an orphan perhaps. Even better if she were. Charmante. He might call her mat, though she would fail to understand the term.

Satisfied that Letitia had vanished to her appointed assignation with the head footman, Easton proceeded into the hall and mounted the wide stairway, pausing en route on the first floor to meander into his study where, taking up a pen and dipping it into his inkwell, he wrote, 'Faces all about her like pale petals when she fell'. Not bad. Rather good really, except… was it his own or had he pinched it from one of those French chappies, Mallarme, or someone? Not that it mattered. Such gems from his lips fell into the carpet's dust, were trodden beneath the feet of servants, passed unremarked across Letitia's mind. Dusting the ink, he slipped the piece of paper into a drawer where it joined many other of his would-be gems and then stepped out beyond to pass a bathroom wherein much splashing was to be heard.

Kate was in a liquid heaven now. She had heard of 'posh barns' but had never been in one before. Home was one room down in Spitalfields where she slept on the floor on a thin palisse alongside her two sisters and her younger brother while their parents lay on the other side of the floor. Home was where she normally spent all day making up envelopes for sixpence a thousand and where fresh bread and dripping was to her as caviar was to the Sherwoods.