And he’d made no such suggestion.

Maybe it was because he was unwilling to face any hostile anti-German feeling. Maybe not. Whatever the reason, the bottom line was that he wasn’t urgently making his way to be with her.

During the following months, with a scaled-down staff, she cared for the remainder of her patients until they were fit enough to be discharged. Then she turned her attention to the task of converting what had been a convalescent home back into a family home.

Paul, now a head and a half taller than her, gave what help he could at weekends and Will, now engaged to Jenny, helped as well.

‘Adam would come and give a hand if we asked him,’ Paul said as the three of them struggled with the dismantling of the sluice room. ‘He gives rugby coaching on Saturday mornings, so I see him regularly.’

‘But he’s not at the school full-time, is he?’ she had asked, startled. ‘He isn’t now one of the masters?’

‘Don’t be daft, Aunt Vicky,’ Paul said, imitating her Yorkshire way of talking. ‘He has a mill to run. Priestley’s employ even more workers than Hudson’s now.’

She had had to make a very firm resolve not to keep asking him for news of Adam. It was a resolve she didn’t always keep. Adam was always in her thoughts and she could only presume she was always in his, for both Paul and Max would say on a weekly basis, ‘Captain Priestley’s been asking after you.’

‘I told him we’d just dismantled the sluice room,’ Max said on one occasion, chattily. ‘It’s nice he’s so interested in us all, isn’t it?’

A month later he telephoned.

The sound of his voice made her weak at the knees. She leaned against the hall wall for support, the receiver slippery in her hands.

‘Will you have lunch with me, Vicky?’ His rich, dark voice was urgent. ‘Tea with me? Anything. We were friends before I so stupidly frightened you away. Let’s be friends again. I promise I’ll say and do nothing to cause you offence. I just want to see you again. I have to see you again.’

‘No…I can’t…’ The words were strangled in her throat. She felt utterly panicked, longing to see him again with all her heart but knowing that if she did so she wouldn’t have the will power to ignore the electrical excitement that always spiralled between them—and that he wouldn’t either.

‘Please don’t telephone me again, Adam. And don’t continue trying to maintain contact via Paul and Max. They think it’s just friendly courtesy, but it isn’t fair to them.’

‘This isn’t fair to me, either,’ he said with a fierceness that made her heart somersault. ‘You haven’t seen your husband for five years. He could be with you now, and he isn’t. Life is too short to live without love when it’s there for the taking. Believe me, Vicky. I know.’

‘No,’ she said again, stunned by his frankness, feeling as if there was a knife in her chest that was plunging ever deeper. ‘You deserve something better than a cheap affair with a married woman.’