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seemed to increase as every minute passed.
    He allowed his valet to help him undress without speaking and, only when he was alone, did the Marquis ask himself what he should do.
    He knew that he could not stay in England to face Sarah, the explanations that would have to be made and the scene that would follow.
    He knew, too, because he was deeply humiliated by what he had seen, that it would take him some time to control himself to the point where he could appear indifferent.
    At the moment he was angry and hurt, wounded and jealous, murderous and yet at the same time weak with a kind of misery that he knew would increase because he had lost something that he thought was more valuable that anything he had ever possessed before.
    He asked himself a thousand times how he could have been so foolish as to be deceived like any greenhorn by what he knew now was a scheming woman.
    He had no doubt that Sarah had intended to marry him from the first moment they had met. He could see all too clearly that by playing ‘hard to get’ she had excited and enticed him into offering her exactly what she had wanted, which was marriage.
    The Marquis admitted frankly that usually his love affairs did not last very long.
    Once a woman had surrendered herself, he had found the repetition of their lovemaking soon became tedious and he began to wonder what it would be like to pursue another beauty and whether she would be more original, more captivating than the one he was with now.
    Sarah had been too clever to allow him to feel like that and had driven him crazy by bestowing her favours after a long wooing and then withholding them again.
    The Marquis gritted his teeth when he thought of how he had fallen into the trap that women have set for men ever since the days of Adam and Eve.
    Each move had been traditional, almost like a game of chess, but he had not had the intelligence to see it until now.
    Then he told himself in the darkness of the night that he could not face Sarah, because all he could really accuse her of was being more astute than he was.
    ‘I have to get away,’ he thought and remembered his yacht that was waiting ready for him at Dover.
    It was three months since he had used it and then only for a short journey across the Channel with a friend who wished to fight a duel without anyone in England being aware of it.
    He knew that, on his orders, the yacht was always ready to put to sea at a moment’s notice.
    He had risen before dawn and left Elvin when the stars were still shining in the sky.
    The Marquis could hear the slap of the sea against the bow of the yacht as they were under way and, as the timbers creaked and there was the rasp in the rigging, he felt the sails fill and knew there was a strong wind blowing.
    ‘At least there will be nothing to hold us up,’ he told himself.
    He had given his Captain instructions the night before and it should take them less than five hours to reach Calais where he would deposit his passenger. After that, he would be free to sail anywhere in the world that took his fancy.
    He wondered now how Ola would manage on the way to Paris, but then he told himself it was none of his business.
    It must have been the brandy last night that had made him feel he ought to help her out of what must have been for her a frightening situation – that is if he was to believe what she had told him.
    There was no doubt that the man who had been involved in the accident through driving his horses in a pea-soup fog was elderly and the girl with her flaming red hair was very young.
    But perhaps she was deceitful and a liar, the Marquis thought scornfully, as all women were – damn them!
    “When I return to England there will be no more Sarahs in my life,” he said aloud, “and no more games of pretence. No woman will ever have the opportunity to do this to me again.”
    He could almost hear himself saying his loving words to Sarah, which now made him blush with embarrassment.
    Although he had thought