The crowd surged and swelled, and in another moment Mr Greensmith was gone from sight and Eleanor, who was not going that way at all, but who was instead going into the hospital next door, and who had come out in defiance of her husband, was uneasy.

For did Mr Greensmith, too, believe her to be indisposed? The thought unsettled her and she hurried a little with her head down. She did not know how much her husband’s secretary might know of his employer’s personal affairs, how much the young man might report back to him. She did not know very much at all about Mr Greensmith, she supposed. He played things very close to his chest, though he was always extremely well turned out and she suspected him of harbouring some very great ambitions, politically.

And then she dismissed Mr Greensmith from her thoughts, though the nagging doubt remained that he had seen her.

‘My dear Mrs Dunlevy, this is a delightful surprise. Please do sit. Allow me to offer you some tea.’

‘Ambrose. You are too kind.’

Eleanor allowed herself to be ushered to a seat and for tea with lemon to be administered to her and almost at once she began to feel better, for there is nothing like being administered to, especially by a wealthy, much older gentleman, and Ambrose Winks was undoubtedly both of these.

Winks had been, in some distant past, deputy superintendent of the hospital, though now he filled his time as chairman of its Benevolence Committee, a committee on which Eleanor had, for many years and with varying degrees of enthusiasm, served. He was an octogenarian, almost as old as the original hospital, and a man who dressed as though frockcoats, stovetop hats and untamed white beards had never gone out of fashion. His manners, too, had something of the arcane about them: when he spoke of Her Majesty, which he did often, it was as if she were eternally the girl of seventeen just ascended to the throne and he seemed frozen at that point, somewhere mid-century. But he was a dear man, and he always had time for Eleanor. For any lady, really.

‘You are looking radiant,’ he declared, which was perhaps something one said to a younger lady, not one just past her fortieth year, but from Winks’s great age the difference between twenty and forty must seem very slight. ‘I have been reading of your husband’s endeavours,’ he went on. ‘He is with our dear Premier on this Tour of the South?’

And when she nodded,

‘You do not accompany him?’

One never knew with Ambrose if a simple enquiry was just that, or if there was something more to it.

‘He will have his hands full managing the Premier,’ said Eleanor, keeping her eyes level with his. ‘He does not need the added burden of a wife in tow.’

‘I am sure you could never be a burden, Mrs Dunlevy.’