All morning Alice fidgeted, even though she knew full well he could not appear before noon. Two or three times she heard the clack of a four in the lane and started out, but each time the carriage had passed before she made the gates. To calm herself she went to the stables which, being empty on account of the season, gave her little reason to linger. Then she went to ascertain the water level in the cistern behind the wall of the glasshouse, where she was met by a toad who was sunning himself on a flat stone by the side of it, next to a patch of rhubarb. Toads were really so very different from frogs, with their warty backs like fallen autumn leaves; it was a mystery to her that anyone could confuse the two. She stood inspecting him for a time. She went back to the house and checked herself in the glass: she looked very much as she had ten minutes before. It occurred to her that the windowsill of William’s dressing room was prone to collect flies: she went upstairs to open the window. She came down. It was useless to take up a book, for she knew she would not be able to steady her heart enough to profit from reading. She noticed that the door of the long case clock in the hall was not properly closed: she shut it. There were as ever letters to which she must respond, so she installed herself at the writing table in the library and took up her pen, but no sooner had she written a salutation at the top of a page – the recipient was to have been a kind lady at Winchcombe, who had invited her and William to a tennis party – than ink had unaccountably bled all over her hand and the paper besides and she was obliged to go back upstairs and wash, before it worked its way on to her white cuffs. She checked herself once again in the glass in her room. How was it possible that her glance could be returned to her so levelly, apparently so calmly contained within her form? She felt just now very uncontained, as if her feelings were a bramble spilling over a broken wall, a tangle of leaves and reaching stalks, hidden thorns, bright tiny insects moving among the small white flowers. It was strange to her that her features betrayed none of this disquiet, that her hair stayed close to her head and did not spring out like uncut meadow grass from the sheer force of all her thoughts. That her skin remained impermeable.