‘She decided, in fact,’ said Fabian, ‘to meet you on your own ground, Terry, and give battle.’ He added awkwardly, ‘That doesn’t seem horrible to me; pitiful, rather, and intensely embarrassing. How like her and how futile.’

‘But he was devoted to her,’ Ursula protested. And, as if she had made a discovery that astonished and shocked her, she cried out, ‘You cheated, Terry. It happened because you were young. You shouldn’t cheat in that way when you’re young. They’re all alike—men of his age. If you’d gone away he’d have forgotten.’

‘No!’ said Terence strongly.

To Alleyn’s discomfiture they both turned to him.

‘He’d have forgotten,’ Ursula repeated. ‘Wouldn’t he?’

‘My dear child,’ Alleyn said, intensely conscious of his age, ‘how can I possibly tell?’ But when he thought of Arthur Rubrick, ill and exhausted by his wife’s public activities, he was inclined to believe that Ursula was partly right. With Terence gone, might not the emotion that Rubrick had felt for her have faded soon into an only half-regretful memory?

‘You’re all the same,’ Ursula muttered, and Alleyn felt himself classed, disagreeably, with Arthur Rubrick, among the senile romantics. ‘You go queer.’

‘Well, but damn it all,’ Fabian protested, ‘if it comes to that, Flossie’s behaviour was pretty queer too. To flirt with your husband after twenty-five years of married life—’

‘That was entirely different,’ Ursula flashed at him, ‘and anyway, Terry, if she did, it was your fault.’

‘I didn’t do it,’ Terence said, for the first time defending herself. ‘It happened. And until she came into the room it was right. I knew it was right. I knew it completely with my reason as well as with my emotion. It was as if I had suddenly been brought into focus, as if I was, for the first time, completely Me. It couldn’t possibly be wrong.’

She appealed to Ursula and perhaps, Alleyn thought, to the two young men. She asked them for understanding and succeeded in faintly embarrassing them.

‘Yes,’ said Ursula uncomfortably, ‘but how you could! With Uncle Arthur! He was nearly fifty.’

Silence followed this statement. Alleyn, who was forty-seven, realized with amusement that Douglas and Fabian found Ursula’s argument unanswerable.

‘I didn’t hurt him, Fabian,’ Terence said at last. ‘I’m certain I didn’t. If he was hurt it was by her. She was atrociously possessive.’

‘Because of you,’ said Ursula.

‘But we couldn’t help it. You talk as if I planned what happened. It came out of a clear sky. It wasn’t of my doing. And there wasn’t a sequel, Ursula. You needn’t think we had surreptitious scenes. We didn’t. We were both of us, I believe, a little happier in our knowledge of each other. That was all.’

‘When he was ill,’ said Fabian, ‘did you talk about it, Terry?’