On the long journey home, Otway and Margaret would make the most of their early morning meetings. He told her how everyone in Ireland rode horses and hunting was done by other than just the gentry. She told him that she had had a pony when she was three years old that carried her to school. At ten she had been presented with the mask of the fox at a hunt at Chartwell in Surrey.
He sat as her patient model, when she sketched him. She began to get deeper into his past life and he told her that his marriage was on the rocks.
Otway realised that he had found a companion who would love his sport. She was by now deeply in love. There were too many spinsters after the Great War and too few men of her age alive. There were younger ones that had missed the war. But here was a real man, who was very strong and very gentle. Their last night on board sealed their future.
Next morning, as the Aguila was sailing up the Mersey, Otway took Margaret into the ship’s three-foot-square library.
