Troy went straight on deck when she had finished her dinner and was about to go ashore when up came Miss Rickerby-Carrick from below, hailing her in a curious kind of soft-pedalled shout.

‘Mrs Alleyn! I say! Mrs Alleyn!’

Troy paused.

‘Look!’ said Miss Rickerby-Carrick coming close to her and whispering. ‘I—are you going up to the village? Can I come with you? I’ve got something—’ she looked over her shoulder and up and down the deck though she must have known as well as Troy that the others were all below. ‘I want to ask your advice. It’s awfully important. Really. I promise,’ she whispered.

‘Well—yes. All right, if you really think—’

‘Please. I’ll just get my cardi. I won’t be a tick. Only as far as the village. Before the others start—it’s awfully important. Honest injun. Please.’

She advanced her crazy-looking face so close that Troy took an involuntary step backward.

‘Be kind!’ Miss Rickerby-Carrick whispered. ‘Let me tell you. Let me!’

She stood before Troy: a grotesque, a dreadfully vulnerable person. And the worst of it was, Troy thought, she herself was now so far caught up in a web of intangible misgivings that she could not know, could not trust herself to judge, whether the panic she thought she saw in those watery eyes was a mere reflection of the ill-defined anxiety which was building itself up around her own very real delight in the little cruise of the Zodiac. Or whether Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s unmistakable schwarm was about to break out in a big way.

‘Oh please!’ she repeated, ‘for God’s sake! Please.’

‘Well, of course,’ Troy said, helplessly. ‘Of course.’

‘Oh, you are a darling,’ exclaimed Miss Rickerby-Carrick and bolted for the companion-way.

She collided with Mr Pollock and there was much confusion and incoherent apology before she retired below and he emerged on deck.

He had brought back to Troy the Signs of the Zodiac with the lettering completed. It was beautifully done, right in scale and manner and execution and Troy told him so warmly. He said in his flat voice with its swallowed consonants and plummy vowels that she need think nothing of it, the obligation was all his and he hung about in his odd way offering a few scraps of disjointed information to the effect that he’d gone from the signwriting into the printing trade but there hadn’t been any money in that. He made remarks that faded out after one or two words and gave curious little sounds that were either self-conscious laughs or coughs.

‘Do you paint?’ Troy asked. ‘As well as this? Or draw?’

He hastened to assure her that he did not. ‘Me? A flippin’ awtist? Do you mind!’

‘I thought from the way you looked at this thing—’

‘Then you thought wrong,’ he said with an unexpected slap of rudeness.