Chapter FourThe Earl, looking down the table in the great dining room, felt that this was a scene he could remember peeping at from the Minstrel’s Gallery when he was a small boy.
He used to slip up the small staircase and peep through the carved oak screen at the dinner parties given by his mother and father.
He always thought that his father, sitting at the head of the table in a chair carved with the family arms, looked like a King.
His mother, in a glittering tiara with diamonds at her throat, had come earlier to his bedroom to kiss him goodnight.
“You look like a fairy Princess, Mama!” he told her once and she had laughed.
She would hold him close in her arms and he thought that, when she died, that he would always remember her softness and sweetness and no other woman could ever
