Yet he found himself on his knees. He grasped Jane’s hand. Part of him knew that he looked ridiculous, but it all had to be done and said now, all his pent-up love and passion had to be laid before her.

‘Jane!’ he cried out. ‘I have tried and tried to cast you out of my mind. I’ve done everything a man could do. But I’ve failed. You haunt me every moment of my life.’

‘Doctor Ross …’

‘Don’t speak! Please! Let me say what I have to say. I want to marry you. If you won’t have me, then I will leave England and never come back, but I have to ask you one last time, will you be my wife?’

He was looking up at Jane, but could not read her thoughts. It seemed to him that there was a flicker of a smile on her mouth and he couldn’t bear the sight of this mocking smile, so he lowered his head and buried his face in her lap. He knew this was beyond all modesty, but he didn’t care. He understood that his whole future rested upon this moment.

To his shame, he realised that he was on the verge of weeping, that he wanted to claw at Jane’s body, as a sorrowing child sometimes claws at his mother. And he couldn’t suppress the sob that now came straight from his heart, the cry of an animal in pain, but the next thing that he felt was the touch of Jane’s hand on his neck and she began stroking his hair. Then, she raised him up and held him close to her, face to face, looking into his hard blue eyes.

‘Perhaps, after all, it is very simple,’ she said. ‘I will marry you and we will do what everybody does; we will strive to be happy.’

What followed next was not what would have followed with any other well-brought-up young woman except – at that moment in time – with Jane Adeane.

She kissed Ross and he found that her kiss was searching and brazen and deep. She kissed him again and told him that she thought it strange in society how men and women bound themselves in lifelong marriage without first finding out if they were compatible in bed. And he took this for the invitation it appeared to be. The supper and wine were forgotten. They went hand in hand to his bedroom.

Jane took off all her finery, loosened her hair from its satin ribbons and lay down naked on his narrow bed, caressing her own body as provocatively as any whore while she waited for him to join her, as if to display to him that, for all her extravagant height and strength, she was ready to surrender to him.

The sight of this, so long imagined, was as extraordinary, as full of wonder to Ross as the sight of a sunrise to one who has been held captive in darkness for long and frozen years.