Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

CHAPTER ONE

A CAUSE

LADY MARY OVERNDON TICKLED THE END OF HER LONG AND patrician nose with a tortoiseshell lorgnette that was as old-fashioned as her bun-shaped coiffure. Thirty years before her long grey dress, with its flounces and its trimmings of fur and beads and its stiffened collar of fine muslin, might have been in the height of fashion; in this year of grace the only thing about Lady Mary in the height of fashion was her mind, and few were privileged to know much of its workings.

Colonel George Belton, her companion in the sunlit room overlooking the lawn and tennis-courts of Overndon Manor, studied her, and smiled to himself. She looked an arrogant old shrew — hard, embittered, and self-centred, as though sixty years in a fast-changing world had proved too much for her.

The Cornel laughed suddenly. Lady Mary looked at him, as he knew she would, and her grey eyes were sparkling. A man or woman of understanding had but to look into her deep grey eyes to know that her thin lips and pointed chin were lying. Her eyes bespoke humour and understanding. So did her voice — a rather slow, low voice.

“What’s the matter with you now, George?” she asked.

The Colonel smiled behind his bushy white moustache.

“I was thinking,” he said, “that, of all the men who’ve met you because of Marie, Mannering’s the only one who’s not been scared away. There are possibilities about that man, Mary.”

“I don’t think so, George, where Marie is concerned.”