In the mild afternoon sunshine, Darcy took her over the farm. The stone outbuildings rambled behind the main house. There were tall, mellow barns with steeply sloping roofs, long open-sided sheds displaying gleaming yellow and scarlet farm machinery, scrubbed pens with white-painted rails and busy farm-workers who greeted Darcy respectfully, and with obvious liking. Even Helen’s unpractised eye could see that Darcy ran Mere with loving efficiency.

Around one corner they met a man in muddy wellingtons who was climbing into a Land Rover. Darcy shook his hand enthusiastically and introduced him as ‘Tim Oakshott. Best vet for miles around.’ Helen stood aside as the two men worried over a sick ewe, thinking with amusement how alike they looked. She recalled how she had thought at first, in the billiard room at Montcalm, that Darcy himself might just be a country vet.

‘I see a lot of Tim,’ Darcy told her as they waved at the disappearing Land Rover. ‘More than anyone else, I suppose. Except for you, now.’ And he gave her an odd, half-defiant sidelong glance.

After their tour they had tea together in Darcy’s sitting room, a dark little bachelor den that doubled as an office. There was an old-fashioned desk in one corner, heaped with an orderly pile of papers.

At last, in the early evening, Darcy walked her back through the house and out to the sheltered corner where he had left his car. The farm seemed deserted now. Helen supposed that the farmhands had gone for the day, back to their honey-stone cottages in Mere village.

It was very quiet.

Darcy leaned past her to open the passenger door for her. Dimly, Helen heard the rooks calling in the tall elms two fields away.

Then Darcy bent his head and kissed her. His mouth was gentle and his skin against hers was very soft. She saw that there was a tiny piece of yellow straw caught in the wool at the neck of his sweater. Then as her eyes travelled she saw his hair with the sun shining through it, and it was exactly the same gold as Oliver’s. A spasm of loss and longing, the more breathtaking because it was so unheralded, hit her so sharply that she almost doubled up.

Then, just as quickly, it was gone. It was Darcy who was kissing her, in the sheltered angle of a stone wall with the sun on crumbling yellow lichens and the smell of woodsmoke in the air.

Darcy lifted his head. ‘Helen?’ he said softly, and his voice was eager. ‘You … didn’t mind?’

Helen saw him very clearly then, the plain, good-natured face and the colourless hair, nothing like Oliver’s now, falling over his eyes.