At the sight of her, Valentine Ross laid down his still-unlit cheroot and stood up. A nervous smile creased his cheek and he raised his hand. The tall young woman did not return the smile, or else had not seen it. She hesitated a moment, as though she might be short-sighted and feared to stumble on the pathway through the tea tables to where he stood. So he began to move towards her. Mrs Morrissey watched him greet her with a formal little bow, then offer his arm and she took it and they returned together to where he had been sitting.

Clorinda Morrissey pulled out a chair for her, realising as she did so that she, who had sometimes been considered tall in Ireland, only came up to the lady’s chin, her starched lace cap notwithstanding.

‘Mrs Morrissey,’ said Valentine Ross, ‘may I present to you Miss Jane Adeane. Miss Adeane is the daughter of our renowned surgeon, Sir William Adeane, with whom I have the honour to work.’

Mrs Morrissey, though she was the patronne of her own enterprise and now known by name across most of the city of Bath, was nevertheless scrupulous about curtseying to those she served. This curtsey, however, was more a charming little bounce, as though her shoes contained invisible springs, and she noticed that it sometimes made people smile. She wished to tell them that she performed it in this way, not to amuse them, but simply to save time, that the proprietor of a tea room must be forever scuttling from one task to the next, from stove to kettle, from sink to linen cupboard, from jam jar to cream dish, from formal greeting to Bill of Sale – and all without seeming to be flustered or discommoded in any way. She really had no leisure for curtseys.

Clorinda Morrissey performed her bounce now and saw a smile break out on the stern features of Miss Jane Adeane. Miss Adeane held out her hand in greeting and Mrs Morrissey took it.

‘I have heard,’ said Miss Jane, ‘about the lemon cake.’

The coal fire burned a volcanic red. Among the tea-drinkers, one small dog lay watchfully under a table, waiting for time to pass, waiting for his mistress to remember how much he longed to walk in the fresh air. At another table, an elderly man – or gentleman, as he would have preferred to be called – sitting alone, appeared to be a Person of the Cloth, but was, at that moment, in the very act of staining that cloth with clotted cream and sticky crumbs from his scones. Though he did not appear to notice his own clumsiness, others among Mrs Morrissey’s clientele may have looked up and been amused by the mess he’d made.

If these same people had glanced at Valentine Ross, they would have taken him, at first sight, for the dependable, hard-working and prosperous man that he was. Those hard blue eyes, perhaps, suggested a certain ruthlessness in his character, or that he had moments of inappropriate yearning or imagining, yet it was of course impossible to guess what these might be.