“Is that one of your father’s compositions?”
“Yes.”
Her voice was low and it had exactly the tone, he thought, that he might have expected of her.
“I have met your father.”
There was a sudden brightness in her eyes almost as if they held the sunshine.
It was strange, the Duke thought, that her hair should be fair.
Then he recalled that Pierre Vallon was not dark like most Frenchmen and he imagined, although he was not sure, that he came from Normandy, where fair hair and blue eyes were as common as in England.
There was no doubt that Zoia must have her mother’s eyes and yet they held none of the mystery that the Duke had always associated with Russian women.
Instead there was something that, just like her face, had a spiritual quality about it which was inescapable.
He walked forw
