Helen sat motionless, uncomfortably hunched on her bed in the cold room, too shocked by the labyrinths of her self-deception even to move.

And what now?

Darcy, she reminded herself deliberately. When her imagination captured his face, it was with his half-habitual anxious frown. She was aware of the mixture of tenderness, loyalty and unshakeable affection that she felt for him. Love, too. But nothing like the insistent force that had assailed her tonight. She had never felt anything like that before.

Slowly Helen began to understand. She saw that the obscure irritation and sense of unease that Tom roused in her was rooted in attraction, physical as much as emotional. She admitted it to herself as clinically as she could. But she had made that mistake once, disastrously, with Oliver. She could never, ever, let it happen again.

Funny, she thought, with a wry flicker of amusement. I’d never have thought of myself as particularly hot-blooded. And I once thought I knew myself quite well.

Wrong, and wrong again.

Suddenly Helen felt coldly afraid. She didn’t understand or even trust herself any more, and she felt unpleasantly adrift in a dark, threatening sea. A single certainty flashed like a beacon at her. It was Darcy’s worth, unchanging and pledged to her with utmost generosity. As she had pledged herself in return. She had promised to marry Darcy, and that remained a single fixed point.

It was impossible, impossible, to think of turning to him now and saying that she had made a mistake. And although the deepest core of herself longed blindly for Tom, the careful, practical Helen who was just as much a part of her told her that she should cling to the security of Darcy. Part of her recoiled from the ferment of her feelings for Tom, and groped blindly backwards to safety.

Time, she whispered out loud. I need time. Time to distinguish between two kinds of love, and to gauge which one is real.

Tomorrow, she promised herself, she would talk to Darcy. She would explain – not about tonight, there must never be a whisper of that – but about needing time, and peace, to think about their marriage.

Darcy would understand, because he always did.

And because she was afraid that she could not trust herself otherwise, she made one other resolution. She must not see Tom alone any more. To see him was to succumb to him, and for Darcy’s sake that must never be allowed to happen.

At once a little of her fear abated. Yet at the same time the inner, reckless Helen cried out No. I love him. I need to see him. The voice was so passionate that she almost wavered.

To silence it, Helen reached out and turned on the lamp. The room was lit with the familiar glow, every outline reassuringly the same in spite of the upheaval of her world.