She went to the window and saw that Adaline Jellicoe waited outside in a hansom cab. She emerged now from the cab wearing a veil, and if she had come directly from a funeral at which she was the sole mourner she would look thus: cloaked in a solitude that kept her apart from others. She might look out at the world and the world might look in at her but there was no possibility of communion, or so thought Eleanor, who stood at her window and dreaded her friend’s arrival. But it could not be put off. She left her room and went downstairs.

‘Mrs Jellicoe,’ she said, entering the drawing room and at once setting the boundaries for the visit. The last time they had met she had addressed her as Adaline. ‘Do, please, sit down.’ And Eleanor smiled, because it cost her nothing to do so. Alice hovered in the doorway awaiting instruction. ‘Tea, I think,’ she said, and the maid departed, leaving behind her in the room a disturbance and unease of which she was perhaps dimly aware, for it crackled in the very air.

Eleanor was silent. She waited. She would not be rushed in her own drawing room by a caller who was unexpected and hardly welcome. Her visitor wore a buttoned jacket of lavender grey, tight at the waist and arm, capped at the shoulders, over a high lace collar, a skirt of the same stuff, white gloves with tiny pearl buttons at the wrist and pearls at her throat. Her hat, very small and round and pinned to her hair, was also of silver-grey silk, and no doubt the wearer had sat before her dressing table this morning and dressed herself with the same care and attention as did any lady of their acquaintance, but here the comparison ended for Mrs Jellicoe was not the same as any lady of their acquaintance and never would be again.

Mrs Jellicoe sat. She slowly rolled back her veil, which was made of a thin gauze. Look on this face, she said, though she uttered no words.

Eleanor gazed upon the woman now uncovered, but unlike the smile it cost her something to do so. There was some trickery here, for the face she saw was the face of a friend as familiar to her as the twisting roads and pretty little bays that surrounded her own home, but the person who stared out at her from behind the grey-blue eyes was strange to her. A face, dark-browed, straight-nosed and full-lipped and surrounded by a mass of glorious chestnut hair, and striking to some men, less so to others, and with both poise and bearing intact. But it was a face, a body, from which the essence had been gouged.

‘Eleanor,’ said her visitor at last, her voice very low, ‘I understand how disagreeable it is for you to receive me in these circumstances. Distasteful, even.’