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unexpectedly if Sarah was entertaining their neighbours.
    Then it struck him that despite the fact that there were lights in the drawing room everything seemed very quiet.
    Although he was listening intently, he could hear no chatter of voices or laughter as might have been expected.
    ‘Perhaps she has simply not yet gone to bed,’ he told himself. “She may be sitting reading or sewing in the drawing room and, if I knock on the window, she will open it.”
    He took a step forward from the shelter of the rhododendrons and, as he did so, he saw the long French window open and someone standing against the light.
    ‘She is waiting for me,’ he thought joyously.
    They were so attuned to each other, he told himself, that she had known perceptively, almost clairvoyantly, that he was coming and had opened the window to welcome him in.
    There was a rapturous smile on the Marquis’s lips as he took another step forward.
    Then suddenly he saw that Sarah was not alone.
    A man had appeared beside her and hastily the Marquis retreated into the shadows.
    Now he saw Sarah turn her face up towards the man beside her and the next moment she was in his arms and he was kissing her!
    At first the Marquis could hardly believe that what he was seeing was not a figment of his imagination or part of some terrible nightmare.
    Then the moon came out from behind the clouds and he could see more clearly than he had done before.
    Sarah was wearing her blue negligee.
    He knew it well and, when he had last seen it, she had been letting him out of the window as she was doing now with the man she was kissing.
    What was more, the Marquis recognised who he was.
    He was the handsome younger son of a Peer whom the Marquis had found, since he had inherited Elvin, to be a considerable nuisance.
    Because the boundaries of their two estates marched together, Lord Harrop was always sending complaints of one sort or another to the Marquis.
    He knew that the reason for most of them was that Lord Harrop was far from wealthy and was determined to extort from his rich neighbour every concession and help for his own estate that was possible.
    The Marquis was well aware that Lord Harrop’s sons – and there were four of them – were jealous of the horses he was able to ride hunting, at the local point-to-points and at the steeplechases, which he invariably won.
    It was not his fault, but it flashed through his mind now that Anthony had exacted his revenge by taking from him the only woman he had ever wished to marry.
    Then, as he watched Anthony kiss Sarah before he stepped out through the window and onto the terrace outside, the Marquis felt the blood rush to his head.
    He wanted to fight Anthony, knock him down and even kill him.
    Then not only years of self-control kept him from moving but a pride which told him he had been made a fool of not only by Sarah but by a man younger than himself whom he had always thought too insignificant even to consider as a rival.
    As the Marquis battled with himself, he realised that Anthony was walking towards him and in the space of a few seconds they would meet face to face.
    He clenched his fists together.
    Then, as he was not quite certain what he would do, he heard Sarah’s voice, soft and sweet as it had so often been to him, call out,
    “Anthony, darling, I have something more to say to you.”
    His rival turned back and it was then the Marquis knew that he must escape.
    He retreated, moving swiftly back the way he had come and found his horse.
    It was only as he mounted that he saw Anthony’s horse about fifty yards further along the side of the shrubbery.
    In the darkness before the moon came out he had not noticed it, but now he could see it quite clearly.
    The Marquis wasted no time and he just rode away, hoping that Anthony would not see him go.
    It was only when he reached home and walked upstairs to his own room that he felt numb with shock, and there was, at the same time, a growing anger deep within him that