Maud told Mathilda, on her placid way to the morning-room, that she thought it was a good thing Stephen was not going to marry Valerie, since she seemed an uncontrolled girl, not at all likely to make him comfortable. She seemed to have no comment to make on the new and lurid light thrown on to Nathaniel’s murder, and Mathilda was unable to resist the impulse to ask her if she had grasped the meaning of what Stephen had told them.

‘Oh yes!’ Maud said. ‘I always thought something like that must have happened.’

Mathilda fairly gasped. ‘You thought it? You never said so!’

‘No, dear. I make a point of not interfering,’ Maud explained.

‘I must confess it hadn’t occurred to me that any of us could be quite so base!’ Mathilda said.

Maud’s face was quite inscrutable. ‘Hadn’t it?’ she said, uninterested and unsurprised.

Valerie, meanwhile, had been led upstairs, gustily sobbing, by her mother, who vented her own annoyance at having so precipitately jettisoned Stephen on Joseph, telling him that although she was never one to make trouble she felt bound to say that her girlie had been treated at Lexham with a total lack of consideration.

Poor Joseph was stricken to incoherence by the injustice of this accusation, and could only gaze after the matron in shocked bewilderment. He was recalled to a sense of his surroundings by the entrance of the servants, to clear the table, and went away to look for someone with whom he could discuss the latest developments of the case.

He was fortunate enough to find Mathilda, and at once took her by the arm and led her off to the library. ‘I’m getting old, Tilda – too old for this kind of thing!’ he told her. ‘Yesterday I thought that if only the cloud could be lifted from Stephen, nothing else would matter. Today I find myself with a possibility so horrible – Tilda, who, I ask of you, could bear such a grudge against Stephen?’

‘It might not be so much a question of a grudge as an instinct of pure sauve qui peut,’ she pointed out.

‘No one but a snake in the grass could do such a thing!’

She said dryly: ‘Anyone capable of stabbing his host in the back would surely be quite capable of throwing the blame on to someone else.’

‘Mottisfont?’ he said. ‘Roydon? Paula? How can you think such a thing of any one of them?’

‘I envy you your touching faith in human nature, Joe.’

She was sorry, however, that she had said that, for Joseph took it as a cue, and said in a very noble way that he thanked God he had got faith in human nature. While she did not doubt that his trusting disposition had sustained a severe shock, and could even be sorry for his distress, she was in no mood to tolerate play-acting, and soon shook him off. Between his relief at knowing Stephen to be exonerated and his dread of discovering that his beloved niece, or his old friend Mottisfont, or poor young Roydon was the guilty party, he was so spiritually torn that the optimism of a lifetime seemed to be in danger of deserting him.