So Douglas arrived at Mount Moon and presently the two young men began their partnership in the workroom. Fabian said, wryly, that from the beginning he had watched for an attraction to spring up between Ursula and Douglas. ‘Certainly Flossie made every possible effort to promote it. She left no stone unturned. The trips à deux to the Pass! The elaborate sorting-out. She displayed the virtuosity of Tommy Johns in the drafting yards. Ursy and Douglas to the right. Terry, Uncle Arthur and me to the left. It was masterly and quite shameless. One evening when, on the eve of one of her trips north, her machinations had been particularly blatant, Uncle Arthur called her Pandora, but she missed the allusion and thought he was making a joke about her luggage.’

For a time Fabian thought her plot was going to work and tried to accustom himself to the notion. He watched, sick with uncertainty, for intimate glances, private jokes, the small change of courtship, to develop between Ursula and Douglas, and thought he saw them where they didn’t exist. ‘I was even glad to keep Douglas in the workshop because then, at least, I knew they were not together. I was mean and subtle but I tried not to be and I don’t think any one noticed.’

‘I merely thought he was fed up with me,’ Ursula said to Alleyn. ‘He treated me with deathly courtesy.’

And then, on a day when Fabian had one of his now very rare headaches, there had been a scene between them. ‘A ridiculous scene,’ he said, looking gently at Ursula. ‘I needn’t describe it. We talked at cross-purposes like people in a Victorian novel.’

‘And I bawled and wept and said if I irritated him he needn’t talk to me at all, and then,’ said Ursula, ‘we had a magic scene in which everything was sorted out and it all looked as if it was going to be Heaven.’

‘But it didn’t work out that way,’ Fabian said. ‘I came to earth and remembered I’d no business making love to anybody and, ten minutes too late, did the little hero number and told Ursy to forget me. She said, no. We had the sort of argument that you might imagine from the context. I weakened, of course. I never was much good at heroics and—well, we agreed I should see the quack again and stand by what he told me. But we’d reckoned without our Floss.’

Fabian turned back to the fireplace and, thrusting his hands in his pockets, looked up at the portrait of his aunt.