Over she goes, clean as a whistle, over the hedge and the waterjump.

Samuel took a pound out of his wallet and pointed to the whisky on the shelf. He could not trust himself yet to speak to the riding woman with the stuffed, enormous bosom and two long milk-white loaves for arms. His throat was still on fire; the heat of the room blazed up his nostrils into his head, and all the words at the tip of his tongue caught like petrol and gorse; he saw three young women flickering by the metal logs, and his three new friends thundered and gestured before him with the terrible exaggeration of people of flesh and blood moving like dramatic prisoners on a screen, doomed forever to enact their pettiness in a magnified exhibition.

He said to himself: Mrs. Antelope, pouring the whisky as though it were four insults, believes that sex is a bed. The act of love is an act of the bed itself; the springs cry "Tumble” and over she goes, horse and all. I can see her lying like a log on a bed, listening with hate and disgust to the masterly voice of the dented sheets.

He felt old and all-knowing and unsteady. His immediate wisdom weighed so heavily that he clutched at the edge of the counter and raised one arm, like a man trapped in the sea, to signal his sinking.

“You may,” Mrs. Dacey said, and the room giggled like a girl.

Now I know, thought Samuel beneath his load, as he struggled to the surface, what is meant by a pillar of the church. Long, cold Mrs. Dacey could prop Bethesda on the remote top of her carved head and freeze with her eyes the beetle-black sinners where they scraped below her. Her joke boomed in the roof.

“You’ve dropped a fiver, Sam.” Mr. Allingham picked up a piece of paper and held it out on the sun-stained palm of his hand.

“It’s Lucille Harris’s address,” Samuel said.

“Why don’t you give her a ring? The phone’s on the stairs, up there.” George Ring pointed. “Outside the Ladies.”

Samuel parted a curtain and mounted.

“Outside the Ladies,” a voice said from the sinking room.

He read the instructions above the telephone, put in two pennies, dialed, and said, “Miss Harris? I’m a friend of Austin’s."

“I am a friend of nobody’s. I am detached,” he whispered into the buzzing receiver. “I am Lopo the outlaw, loping through the night, companion of owls and murderers. Tu wit tu woo,” he said aloud into the mouthpiece.

She did not answer, and he shuffled down the stairs, swung open the curtain, and entered the bright bar with a loping stride.

The three young women had gone. He looked at the grate to see if their shoes were still there, but they had gone too. People leave nothing.

“She must have been out,” he said.