The continued story also acts, perhaps, as a way to exorcise some of those ghosts and demons – especially given the wish-fulfillment nature of the conclusion.

The too-fortuitous return of the earnest Captain Jermyn, who knows how many years later (he was one of the early casualties; the war began in 1914 and ended in 1918; the story was published in 1922 – it could well be that he was MIA, presumed dead, for eight years at the time of this tale), right when Bride has allowed the gentle Peter to take her hand and thus prove her corporeality, is something of a convenience, and can’t help but seem rather too pat. We’d rather believe Bride was long-dead than that her long-lost love should return, with an amnesia backstory to explain his continued absence, exactly at that moment. But in a world ravaged by war, and with so many loves lost to so many young ladies just like Bride, the happy ending must have been a tender and even healing vision of what might have been, and it is very understandable that it should have come from the pen of one then still so young. (Bearing in mind, Heyer was just twenty years of age when this story was published, regardless of how much earlier she may have penned it.)

It is not a story that is particularly Heyer-esque. Not at all. Well, except that the reported histrionics of Peter and Ruth perhaps hold some parallels in the tempestuous beta couple Isabella Milborne and George Wrotham in Friday’s Child (1944), and Heyer’s knack of building a character in just a few broad strokes is entirely present here, especially in her establishment of Mrs. Tippit, the expository force of the story.

Indeed, throughout her works, Heyer always had a way with succinctly conveying the characters of assorted landlord and landladies, and Mrs. Tippit is no exception, even if the fact that she keeps curtseying to Peter and Ruth seems confusingly anachronistic now. But this is a contemporary story to the time in which Heyer lived, we must assume she knew what the obeisance habits of the working classes were – there is no indication that our happy couple have jobs of any kind; they seem to be of the moneyed, idle drawing-room set – and hey, the domestics in Downton Abbey (which covers the years of 1912 – 1926) curtsey and bow all the time, so we must assume that it was still, somehow, a widespread thing, even in that increasingly democratic age.

However, the remainder of the story remains remarkably free of any indicators that Georgette Heyer was in any way its author. Her favoured turns of phrase are absent, as is any sign of witty repartee – it is, in fact, a withal humourless narrative, unusual, though not unique, in the Heyer canon. It reads like a writing exercise, like a work penned by a hopeful youth soon after the war had ended, and then repurposed as a way to make some quick cash from publication, after her name became established so unexpectedly with the 1921 success of The Black Moth. It’s possible that she set out to write a ghost story, or a parody of one – perhaps, originally, it even ended with Peter determined to reconcile with Ruth, and Bride disappearing into the ether, her mission complete.