As he pushed against the tide of people towards her, Helen only thought No. I didn’t expect him to be here.

I don’t want a reunion like this. I’m not ready.

Then he was beside her, seizing her hands and looking expectantly into her eyes.

‘How did you know to meet this flight?’ was all Helen could find to say. Even in her own ears her voice sounded shamefully unwelcoming.

‘I’ve met every flight since I got your wire. Somehow I … thought you’d come home at once.’ Faint disappointment, and forgiveness, showed so plainly in his face that Helen had to bury hers against his shoulder. Her fingers felt the tense muscles in his forearms.

‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m just so surprised to see you here. You shouldn’t … no, I don’t mean that. Thank you for coming. I didn’t know you’d expect me right away.’

At last she looked up at him and his face cleared immediately.

‘Don’t worry,’ he soothed. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’

Chloe and Pansy had gone their separate ways, so Darcy and Helen drove down from London alone together.

As they went she tried to explain her love affair with Venice and the strange hold the city had taken on her, trying to justify her failing to fly home to him at once. Darcy listened, nodding, his eyes on the road.

‘Of course we’ll go together,’ he promised her, ‘for our honeymoon if you like.’ This time he snatched a sideways glance at her, ready to exchange a complicit smile, but Helen’s profile was turned a little away, watching the newly green countryside as it flashed past.

When they reached Oxford, Darcy took the bypass instead of heading for the city centre. Helen turned to him, startled.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Home, of course. To Mere.’

She sank back into her seat. She had been expecting Follies, looking forward to seeing the eccentric old house again, and the privacy of her own place. Instead they were heading for Mere. Darcy was bringing home his bride-to-be. It was all going wrong, she realised miserably. None of this was as she had imagined her homecoming during the last precious hours in Venice. There was nothing to be done about the grey opaque day or the hideous tangle of roads and service stations that fringed Oxford. But the scratchiness was coming from inside her, and it was her own fault.

Darcy was exactly the same as always.

He looked at her, kindly and puzzled, and she could have slapped herself for her perversity.

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Let’s stop for a drink.’

There was a tiny country pub not far away. Darcy was a connoisseur of the beer and Helen enjoyed watching the sparse mixture of car-workers and farmhands that made up the clientele.

‘The Wheatsheaf?’

‘The Wheatsheaf it is.’