What she saw was a gaunt and skeletal individual who bore little resemblance to the man she had known; even his face seemed to have been hollowed out, his cheekbones showing razor sharp under the skin. Pulling herself together, she said politely, ‘I’m glad. I’m sure Clarissa’s been looking after you.’

‘Oh, yes. Clarissa always knows what’s best for us all.’ It was barbed and he immediately could have kicked himself for his boorishness. Too quickly, he said, ‘But enough about me. I hear your business has gone from strength to strength? You have opened another shop, Clarissa tells me.’

Clarissa had been ushering Ruby to an armchair close to the roaring fire as he had spoken, and once Ruby had sat down and they’d resumed their seats, she said quietly, ‘Yes, a short distance from the original one. My sister’s husband was killed in a mining accident at the same time my father passed away and so they had nothing to hold them in Sunderland. They live above the second shop. My mother takes care of my niece and my sister runs the shop. It has worked out very well.’

He was dead? The man she had been betrothed to who had let her down so badly with her sister, he was dead? And she’d taken on the sister and child, along with her mother? He became aware that he was staring and forced himself to say, ‘My condolences. It must have been a difficult time.’

‘Yes, it was.’ This was awful, ten times worse than she had prepared herself for. He was so stiff, so cold.

Clarissa and Godfrey must have been thinking the same because over the next half an hour before lunch they fell over themselves to keep some sort of conversation going. When the gong sounded and they walked through to the dining room everyone breathed a sigh of relief, although in the event the meal was just as uncomfortable.

It was as they retired back to the drawing room where Clarissa had asked their coffee to be served, that she caught hold of Godfrey’s arm, saying to Ruby and Edward, ‘You two go through, we won’t be a minute,’ leaving them no option but to do as she said. Ruby knew she was blushing as she took the seat she’d vacated before the meal, but Edward was as cool as a cucumber to her fevered gaze.