Lord Seabrook had visited the Priory before and he led them next to what had been, Lolita believed, her grandmother’s drawing room.
It was a lovely room with its diamond-paned bow windows looking over the garden and here, as in a number of other rooms, the mantelpieces had been added much later. Many were carved with skill and imagination by the Italian sculptors who had come to England to enhance the houses of the aristocracy.
It was, however, the pictures which Lolita liked the most. Each one gave her a pang of pain because they were no longer in the possession of her family.
There were portraits of the Earls of Walcott and of their wives and children all down the centuries. Every great artist in turn had apparently painted them.
It was miserable for Lolita to think that they would p
