That was assuming her parents would want her to stay; she’d walked out of their lives, after all, and then had stayed away for four years. They might have washed their hands of her. The letters she had written to her mother during that time had been devoid of real emotion and very short, just notes to inform them she was still alive and well and doing all right. And she was a different person now to the girl they had known, she knew she was. Sometimes, when she thought back to the young, trusting eighteen-year-old Ruby, she felt a deep sense of pity for what that girl had gone through but it didn’t hurt any more. She’d had to lose Ellie to know what real grief and sorrow were. Or perhaps it was just that time had healed and in the healing she had understood that a narrow confined life like the one she’d have been expected to live as Adam’s wife would never have been enough?

She shook herself mentally, suddenly irritated with her introspection. Mabel always said that navel-gazing was good for neither man nor beast, and she was right. She only had to think about Edward to know the truth of that. She knew he was in love with her, but she also knew that anything beyond friendship was impossible. Even if Edward asked her to marry him – and he might not be thinking along those lines at all but rather to setting her up somewhere as his mistress, but if his intentions were honourable where she was concerned, marriage would be the death knell on any happiness they might share. He would be committing social and business suicide to take a wife from the working class and he must know that, and that eventually he would feel the price had been too high. And she would never put herself in a position where his family and friends and acquaintances could look down on her. Right or wrong, she had too much pride for that. She wouldn’t be able to suffer slights and injustice in silence, which would make things even more intolerable. But neither was her nature such that she could bear to live a life in the shadows as a man’s mistress, even Edward’s.

Again she mentally checked herself, but now with an impatience that brought her walking along the street. She would be no man’s wife or mistress; she had made that decision a long time ago when she had left this place and that, at least, had not changed. She wanted to be autonomous and in charge of her own destiny and she would never willingly put herself up to be hurt again. Men, even the best of them, weren’t to be trusted. She had learned that the hard way, but having learned it, she would only have herself to blame if she ignored it.