He glanced at her gloves on the console table, at the satin and pearl reticule he had bought her a month or so ago and that she had been pleased with, or had appeared to be. She glanced at them too as she preceded him, and he stood aside and followed her into the little drawing room. The apartment—the one he had found and now paid the rent on—consisted of this little hallway and two rooms beyond: a large drawing room, high-ceilinged and looking out through wide French doors and a tiny wrought-iron balcony to an overgrown garden below; and a bedroom, smaller, and similarly overlooking the garden from a pleasant little bay window. The apartment came furnished with a collection of stuffed upright chairs, one or two writing tables and sewing tables and occasional tables, a faded chintz settee, an array of brass-potted ferns, an oversized sideboard and an even larger dresser. This, combined with the striped crimson-and-white wallpaper and the faded Turkish carpet, all added to the sense of a place twenty years past it prime.

Alasdair seated himself on the settee. He was already dissatisfied with how the visit was going. Her welcome was less than he had hoped for, less than was his due. Really, it was hardly a welcome at all, and he felt himself harden a little against her. He wondered how he might punish her, but all the ways in which he might do so struck him as petty and ridiculous. He decided not to punish her.

Verity remained standing. She was distracted, he saw. She walked over to the French doors and looked out, and Alasdair remembered the very first time he had visited her here, a day or so after he had found the place, tucked away in Woolloomooloo, and he remembered how nervous he had been and how serene she had appeared when it ought to have been the other way about. Detached was perhaps a better word for how she had seemed that day.

‘You have moved me to a place I can neither spell nor pronounce,’ she had said that first day, standing at the window and gazing out at the tangle of overgrown garden below and at the funnels of the steamships docked at the nearby wharves.

‘No one can spell it,’ he had said with a laugh. ‘And anyway, my dear Miss Trent, to whom are you intending to give your address? And come to think of it, to whom are you intending to write?’

‘To no one,’ she had replied. ‘No one at all. It was merely an observation.’

He had still called her Miss Trent then.