As soon as she’d gone, Ross left the allotted room and began opening other doors on the top landing. In the third room, he saw a peignoir belonging to Jane lying on a double bed and her hairbrush fallen onto a sheepskin rug. And these familiar possessions, glimpsed in the nights Jane had spent with him, suddenly touched his heart with anguish. Closing the door quietly behind him, he went towards the bed and gathered the peignoir into his arms and buried his face in its silken folds. Tenderly, he picked up the hairbrush and set it on a mahogany dressing table.

Though he knew that he should not let himself sleep here, he was unable to resist the temptation to do so. He removed his coat and his boots. He took the emerald ring out of his coat pocket, lest it fall out unnoticed, and set it on the dressing table. Then he lay down, cradling the peignoir as a child will cradle a garment belonging to its absent mother. In the scent of the peignoir he felt that he could recognise everything that resided in the soul of his beloved: her angelic power, her beauty and her passion.

It was dark when he woke. Through the window, Ross could see the flickering of a gas lamp at the further end of Tite Street.

He got up and put on his boots and splashed his face with water from a ewer on a washstand. He smoothed the bed and laid the peignoir across it, much as he had found it. Forgetting about the ring, he descended to the drawing room, sensing as he went down the stairs the quietness of the house and wondering whether Jane had not yet returned. He stood in the hall for a moment, noting that candles were burning in the drawing room. He felt hungry and hoped that supper might be being prepared in the kitchen, but there was no scent of cooking and such a heavy silence lingered about the place that he feared he was still alone, except for the sly maid, and was destined to wait out more useless hours before Jane appeared.

But when he pushed open the drawing room door, he saw her. She was lying, fast asleep on a chaise longue, with one foot dangling to the floor. By her side, resting her dark head on Jane’s lap, knelt one of the most beautiful women Ross had ever seen.

For a long time, Ross did not move at all. His gaze remained fixed upon this tableau, as though upon a painting whose meaning he knew to be important but could not perfectly understand.

‘BRITISH EMPIRE DOCTORS’

The arm of the Savage Road which led to the Sadong was now complete. Sir Ralph Savage walked back and forth on it, back and forth, back and forth until the sound of his own feet tired him. All the while, as he paced, he was admiring the road’s straightness and the way the white stones sparkled in the sun. But what he was trying to see in it, above all, was a man-made entity which would resist. He instructed himself to have faith in the new structure, yet dreaded to witness the damage the heavy rains might nevertheless inflict.