Chapter 12

“A little scrap of paper—nothing but a scrap of paper. Sentimental value only, as people say. But it was worth a lot to me and I made the mistake of telling him so. It all goes back to my great-grandmother, Dorothy Lovendale. She was a beauty and much admired by King George the Fourth. She kept eighteen love-letters that he wrote her and hid them, one in each volume of an eighteen-volume calf-bound edition of Richardson’s works. When she died, the family found every volume except the fourteenth, which was missing, …