She nodded dumbly, but there were tears in her eyes. She could feel the curious stare of the other drinkers on her back. ‘Do your parents know about this?’ She held up her fist like a challenge.

‘Not yet. I want us to tell them together. And I want to talk to your mother first, of course. Or Graham, as the male head of the family.’

He was making gentle fun of his own insistence on form, and she smiled with gratitude and felt herself relax a little.

‘Graham will want to make sure that you can keep me in the style to which I am accustomed.’ She drained her drink. ‘Let’s go back to Mere. Back home.’ The correction was quick. ‘If you’ve been hanging around Heathrow for two days you must have a lot of things waiting to be done.’

The sight of Mere almost set things to rights again. The low grey house was as solid as a rock against its dense yew hedges. Darcy, with a brief murmured apology, was on his way to see his head man.

‘I’ll stay out here for a while,’ she told him, ‘and meet you on the way back.’ She leaned against the stone wall of a barn and looked out across the farm in the gathering dusk. The orderly yards were empty, but there was a low hum of activity from the long milking sheds.

Helen half closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself crossing this yard in two or three years’ time.

Perhaps she would have been to pick herbs in the kitchen garden, or visit a sick lamb with a bottle of warm milk.

She would be waiting for her husband to come home, listening for the Land Rover or for the ring of his boots on the well-swept cobbles of the yard. Perhaps there would be a child, an heir for Darcy, with the look of his father and Oliver’s gold hair.

No. That was all in the past. The inappropriateness of the thought frightened her. Darcy’s wife. The lady of the manor.

Fear and uncertainty swept over Helen and she swayed giddily. At her back the stone barn was solid, but the rest of the world was terrifyingly distorted. Then, incongruously, she remembered her dream. The calm sweetness of it flooded back, exactly as she had felt it in Venice. With it came Tom’s face, sharp and clear. Helen was rigid. ‘What have I done?’ she whispered. ‘What am I doing?’ She opened her eyes to see Darcy coming towards her, on his way home to her as he would be all through their married life until they were old and tired. She reached out to snatch his hand and clung to the rough warmth of it. His arm came round her shoulders and he led her into the yellow lamplight inside the house.