The ward had an easterly aspect and through the tall windows slivers of brilliant white light struck the ceiling far above. Cathedral-like, thought Alasdair, though he was not a religious man. If he had been he would not have compared a hospital ward to a cathedral, but he was in that place where men looked for, and saw, what they needed.

‘I do not want other children,’ said Verity.

Alasdair lowered his gaze from the heavens to her face.

‘Perhaps not at first,’ he said.

Alasdair stroked the back of her hand with his forefinger, noticing the delicate blue veins just below the skin, the way her fingers lay spread out on the sheet as though she pressed down on something but how one finger—the little finger—lifted off the bed involuntarily. His heart danced inside him and his ears rang.

She pulled her hand away. ‘I do not wish to have a child. Why do you not take my meaning?’

‘Because I hope that you will come to change your mind.’ And it hurt him, unaccountably, that she had withdrawn her hand, though it was a small thing in itself.

‘You think you know my mind better than I do?’ And she turned to look at him, her eyes curious, intent.

He smiled. ‘I think many young ladies do not know their own minds.’

She turned away again. ‘That is what John used to say.’

He did not anticipate that. ‘You mean this clerk fellow, John Brewster, your fiancé?’

‘John said, It will be better for you, Verity, if you stay in England whilst I go and make my fortune in the colonies. It will be better for you if you do not follow me. It will be better for you—and, of course, what he meant was, it would be better for him—if I gave up any idea of marriage altogether.’

And again Alasdair was at a loss. What did it mean that she talked to him of this man, the dead clerk?

‘And, of course, I did know my own mind and John did not,’ she said, as though she had scored a victory, somehow, over her dead fiancé.

Though this man had not, it now seemed, been her fiancé. The man, Brewster, had thrown her over. But she had come out after him. Pursued him. And again Alasdair did not know what it meant.

‘John was the reason I came to this place,’ she went on, ‘and now I wish to return home. If you believe that I am indebted to you, then you may cast an eye over my present circumstance and reconsider.’

‘Verity, if you wish to return to England, then I shall accompany you. I have already said so.’ And Alasdair was glad to be able to offer his sacrifice to her a second time.

‘I wish you to arrange my passage but I do not wish you to accompany me.’