It was over. They came out again into the sunlight. Half a dozen cameras clicked. Mr Entwhistle shepherded Susan and Miss Gilchrist into the King's Arms, where he had taken the precaution to arrange for lunch to be served in a private room behind the bar.

"Not a very good lunch, I am afraid," he said apologetically.

But the lunch was not at all bad. Miss Gilchrist sniffed a little and murmured that "it was all so dreadful," but cheered up and tackled the Irish stew with appetite after Mr Entwhistle had insisted on her drinking a glass of sherry. He said to Susan:

"I'd no idea you were coming down today, Susan. We could have come together."

"I know I said I wouldn't. But it seemed rather mean for none of the family to be there. I rang up George but he said he was very busy and couldn't possibly make it, and Rosamund had an audition and Uncle Timothy, of course, is a crock. So it had to be me."

"Your husband didn't come with you?"

"Greg had to settle up with his tiresome shop."

Seeing a startled look in Miss Gilchrist's eye, Susan said: "My husband works in a chemist's shop."

A husband in retail trade did not quite square with Miss Gilchrist's impression of Susan's smartness, but she said valiantly: "Oh yes, just like Keats."

"Greg's no poet," said Susan.

She added:

"We've got great plans for the future - a double-barrelled establishment - Cosmetics and Beauty parlour and a laboratory for special preparations."

"That will be much nicer," said Miss Gilchrist approvingly. Something like Elizabeth Arden who is really a Countess, so I have been told - or is that Helena Rubinstein? In any case," she added kindly, "a pharmacist's is not in the least like an ordinary shop - a draper, for instance, or a grocer."

"You kept a tea-shop, you said, didn't you?"

"Yes, indeed," Miss Gilchrist's face lit up. That the Willow Tree had ever been "trade" in the sense that a shop was trade, would never have occurred to her. To keep a tea-shop was in her mind the essence of gentility. She started telling Susan about the Willow Tree.

Mr Entwhistle, who had heard about it before, let his mind drift to other matters. When Susan had spoken to him twice without his answering he hurriedly apologised.

"Forgive me, my dear, I was thinking, as a matter of fact, about your Uncle Timothy. I am a little worried."

"About Uncle Timothy? I shouldn't be. I don't believe really there's anything the matter with him. He's just a hypochondriac."

"Yes - yes, you may be right. I confess it was not his health that was worrying me. It's Mrs Timothy. Apparently she's fallen downstairs and twisted her ankle. She's laid up and your uncle is in a terrible state."

"Because he'll have to look after her instead of the other way about?

Do him a lot of good," said Susan.

"Yes - yes, I dare say. But will your poor aunt get any looking after?