It was a month later, and as was the custom for the big liners, the Mauretania was sailing at midnight from her North River pier after a farewell party that had continued to the last minute. As the huge ship eased out of her berth festooned with paper streamers her siren, pitched two octaves below Middle A, announced her departure from American shores back to the old world. The sound carried with it a whole history of departure and arrival, longing and loss, dreams hoped for and dreams smashed, but for Edward, as he sat on deck buried under the mountain of blankets Clarissa had insisted on bundling round him, the main feeling was one of resignation.

He was still recovering from the pneumonia that had been within a whisker of taking his life, and his doctors had told him that he would be low mentally as well as physically for some time, but he knew it was the fact that he had come to terms with his future that had gradually deadened his emotions. He had had nothing but time with his own thoughts over the last weeks, and he had realized that he would never have married Verity, or any other woman for that matter. He had allowed the American girl to bulldoze him into the engagement, but as for walking down the aisle and promising to be with her for the rest of his life – it would never have happened. Because, and here his thinking was particularly painful, his heart was so irrevocably Ruby’s that he would prefer to live life alone than suffer another woman in the role of his wife. And here was where he had told Clarissa they would have to agree to disagree.