Chapter 12
Nerina dressed slowly and in silence. In fact she was so quiet that Bessie, as she moved about the bedroom, looked at her curiously as if she wondered what was amiss.
Nerina was thinking deeply.
The Dowager Marchioness’s story had made a deep impression on her.
For the first time she was considering Sir Rupert not as a monster but as an ordinary man with ordinary human feelings. Somehow it had always been impossible to believe that he felt anything except anger. That first impression she had of him when he came to Rowanfield Manor on the day of the garden party had remained an unaltered portrait in her mind so that always she saw that smouldering anger on his face and the burning hatred in his eyes.
Yet now she found herself thinking of him in a very different fashion. The
