My feet wanted to skip, only that would have seemed terribly childish. But my heart was dancing inside. It was a beautiful summer’s day with barely a cloud in the sky. The roses in the cottage gardens were a glorious kaleidoscope of colour and the birdsong was almost deafening. And I was with a boy. A nice boy. To hell with Kit Waddington.

I glanced sideways at Robert as we walked. He was taller than I remembered, with mousy-coloured hair cut quite short, rather traditional-looking. He wore a plain cotton shirt with rolled-up sleeves, nothing showy, and khaki shorts showing off long tanned legs with blond hairs that glistened in the sunshine. To be perfectly honest, his face was pretty ordinary except when he smiled, which was quite often. It was a good smile, sweet and straightforward, the sort of smile you could trust. It made me happy.

‘Where are we off to?’

‘I thought we might go for a paddle.’

I couldn’t think of anything nicer on a hot day like this. ‘In the river?’

‘Thought we might go to the lake.’

‘The lake? It’s private, isn’t it? Belongs to the Waddingtons.’

‘They’re fine with us going there.’ I smiled to myself. If Kit saw me with Robert, it might make him jealous. It was a common enough ploy used by romance heroines. It was only when he saw how much he’d lost that he realised how much he had needed her.

I hadn’t approached the lake from this route before. At the bottom of the lane was a cart track that led across a field and into the lower end of the woods, where we emerged onto a broad stretch of close-cropped grass that sloped gently towards the water with a foot-wide strip of gravelly sand at the margins. The edges were punctuated with little outcrops of a spiky-leaved plant – sedge; I looked it up in one of Pa’s books afterwards. And on every upright spike clung a long, thin insect. As we approached, they flew upwards in a cloud of astonishing iridescent blue.

‘Wow,’ I sighed.

‘They’re damsel flies,’ Rob said. ‘Pretty, eh?’

‘Magical.’ We fell into silence, looking around. The lake was deserted and as still as a mirror, reflecting a cloudless sky in a sheet of blue, unbroken apart from the shadows of the trees in the furthest, darkest corner. It was like being in paradise.

‘I’m up for a paddle.’ Rob was sitting on a small rock close to the edge of the water and pulling off his sandals. ‘You coming?’

‘Of course I’m coming.’