Terence was on her feet. She had spoken violently, as if prompted by some unbearable sense of irritation. ‘You’re talking like a fool, Douglas. “Ashamed” or “not ashamed,” what has that got to do with it? I don’t want your championship and, Ursula, I promise you I don’t give a damn whether you think you’re being fair or unfair or whether, as you put it, you’re prepared to “go on liking me”. You make too many assumptions. To have dragooned me into going so far and then to talk magnanimously about letting me off! You’ve all made up your minds, haven’t you, that I loved him? Very well, then, it’s perfectly true. If Mr Alleyn is to hear the whole story, at least let me tell it, plainly and, if it’s not too fantastic a notion, with a little dignity.’

It was strange, Alleyn thought, that Terence Lynne, who from the beginning had resented the discussion and all that it implied, should suddenly yield, as the others had yielded, to this urge for self-revelation. As she developed her story, speaking steadily and with a kind of ruthlessness, he regretted more and more that he could form no clear picture in his mind of Florence Rubrick’s husband; of how he looked, or how wide a physical disparity there had been between Arthur Rubrick and this girl who must have been twenty years his junior.