“You’re right-of course. Tis all true. Yet... I am proud of being a Poldark, if only by marriage. You’re proud of it too, Ross; else you would not feel so strongly about the Trevanions slight of our son”.

“I care that I have hurt you! Isn’t that sufficient.”

Demelza thought: She's one day too late, just one day. How beautiful she is; how I hate her. Then she glanced at Ross again, and for the first time like the stab of a treacherous knife it occurred to her that Ross's desire for her last night was a flicker for empty passion. All day she had been too preoccupied with her own feelings to spare time for his. Now she could see so much in his eyes.

His hands touched the cool skin of her back, Abruptly they slipped inside her frock and closed about her waist. She leaned her head back against his shoulder and he kissed her until the room went dark before her eyes.

Up rising ground by a gravel path he followed her, cutting through part of a wood which had recently been felled and the ground excavated. “ To give us a view of the sea,” she explained.

The most frightening blazing anger was alive in her now. It was not only Elizabeth that she could have killed but Ross. She could have thrown every piece of crockery at him, and knives and forks too. Indeed she could have attacked him knife in hand. Fundamentally there was nothing meek or mild about her. She was a fighter, and it showed now.

Henry was almost upon them, shouting his news with the good lungs that all the family had. A terrible pang stabbed Demelza’s breast, as a memory struck her of a similar scene a dozen or more years ago, only then it had been Jeremy who had been running through the marram grass towards her. She woundered if there was marram grass in Belgium.

“Did I behave myself tonight, Ross?’ she asked. ‘Did I behave as Mrs Poldark should behave?’