“And what did he reply?”
“He said he had an awareness, an instinct that was seldom wrong!”
“And you – what do you feel?”
Lord Dorrington thought for a few seconds.
“I feel an excitement, a kind of tingling not unlike the rising of desire. And I am never mistaken!”
There was silence then he began to speak of a Titian that depicted a woman with hair almost the colour of her own.
Finally in a smaller room, where he said he often sat when he was alone, there was a copy of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
“I had this painted when I was in Florence,” he said. “It’s the only copy of a painting in the whole house. But I wanted this particular picture.”
Alyna stood looking at it for some moments. It was hard for her to see herself in the naked figure of the Goddess rising from the waves in a gl
