Autumn had come. There were big ships in the docks. I never tired of climbing the cliff and looking down on them — the ships of the Lady Line into which one woman had crept — The Secret Woman.
I still treasured the figurehead. I looked at it every day and asked myself: Does he still think of me?
Then one evening when the mist was on the river and the dew drops were clinging like tiny diamonds to the spiders’ webs draping the bushes in the garden, I heard the gate open and footsteps on the flagged path.
I went to the door and waited there. He was coming towards me.
I thought: He has changed; he has grown older; we have both grown older.
But when he reached me and took my hands in his I saw that he had not changed. There was the same lilt in his voice, the same eager smile in those slightly uptilted eyes. But after all, there was a change. He was free.
And there, in the garden of the Queen’s House on that autumn evening I knew — and he knew — that the future was for us to make.