The schoolroom was on the way to her own room and she stopped outside to transfer the windmills from her right hand to her left, so she could open the door.
As she did so, she heard someone crying.
She thought for a moment that it must be Clementine and that she had come to the wrong room.
Then she heard a woman’s voice say,
“But what can I do? It’s more than three months and soon I shall have to leave here.”
It was Miss Dill, Lady Fitzalan’s Governess, who spoke and then to Atalanta’s astonishment she heard a man’s voice reply and recognised it as William’s.
“How could you have been such a fool?”
“But you promised you would marry me,” Miss Dill replied. “You swore that you loved me!”
“You know as well as I do, Mary, that at certain times a man says a lot of foolish things that he
