Such items as he had Gale polished with his pocket handkerchief before replacing them in the box he had chosen as their housing. Held in his hand they had seemed a pitiable collection by which to remember a fine man. He did not wish the sight of her husband’s poor things spread out to be injurious to Mrs Lockwood, so meagre a legacy they made. He had cast about him at home to find some suitable container with which, it was his hope, to imbue them with some little dignity. At last he had assembled them in a mahogany tea-caddy from which he had removed the glass bowl. It was his fancy that the box, with its pleasing proportions, its four balled feet of ebony and the tiny brass scroll at the summit of the lid, bore some resemblance to those grand carved memorials of the previous century.

The Mrs Lockwood he found before him was not at all as sharp-tongued Alice had described her. Rather, the symmetry of her features and the roundness of her face lent her expression an openness which struck him at once as utterly without guile. She was very quiet, whether by temperament or due to the solemn nature of the call William was unable to judge. From the softness of her demeanour and the neatness of her dress, a portraitist might have drawn dainty little feet – the feet of a dancer, or a child – peeping out from beneath her skirts. And yet, as she led the way to the first-floor drawing room, William noticed instead that her feet were rather large and square. The sight of these serviceable, useful feet – feet made for walking and the out-of-doors, feet not intended by nature to be tucked beneath her in some velvet salon – engendered in him a feeling which he was unable to name.

Their interview had barely commenced before the door opened and the two little daughters came in. Mrs Lockwood made to shoo them from the room, but William stayed her: their presence would delay the tale he must impart, of their father’s demise. It was a story for which he had no appetite, in no small part because he had strayed very far from the truth when he had written of it to the lady now before him, and must needs continue in this falsehood if her sensibilities were still to be spared.

Both girls were very fair, with their mother’s round eyes. The younger came straight away to William and leant against his knee, as if he were a trusted uncle long known to her.

‘And what have you been doing this morning?’ William asked them.

‘I was pasting pictures into my scrapbook,’ said the older girl. ‘I made the paste myself, from flour. Mama taught me. But Kitty was just playing with her doll, weren’t you, Kitty?’