‘Bath salts?’ he repeated foolishly.

‘Yes. Well, that’s a funny present for an old lady of ninety, you may say, but my grandma likes them, so why shouldn’t she have them? Verbena. That was my idea. All the others was takin’ her shawls and comforters and hot water bottles’ (she made the catalogue sound immensely boring and dreary by drawling the words contemptuously). ‘Well, I says to Mum, ‘I’m goin’ to be different. Must be different,’ I said. And I took her the bath salts. She was pleased! ’Course, she doesn’t put them in her bath. She just keeps them by her, to smell.’

‘What a good idea,’ said Francis, half of his mind enjoying her conversation and half of it wildly casting about for means to prolong the walk, ask her name, beg that he might see her again.

‘You live round this way?’ asked Toby, looking at him with calm, friendly eyes. She seemed to feel that she had done her duty by saying ‘Well I never’ and ‘Can you beat it’ and was now free to be as friendly as her nature directed her to be. She took him for granted in a way which he found at once sweet and painful. In just the same way she steered a route round a very small child who was playing in her path, saying to it ‘Up-se-daisy, sis; make way for the Lord Mayor.’ He had never seen a calmer girl. She looked as though nothing could surprise her.

‘Me? Oh no. I live in Enbury Heath. I’m just down here on a job, for my firm.’

A faint, far reverberation, a warning quiver as though from an immense distance, sounded in his mind. The firm. Graby, Bryant & Co. Ltd. He was stealing this enchanted walk out of the firm’s time.

He dismissed the warning quiver; he forgot it.

‘That’s a nice part. I live in Highbury. My dad’s a fireman. Like the song, you know. ‘My son Jim’s a fireman, what do you think of that?”

‘By Jove, is he?’ said Francis. He was so young that this piece of news gave him a feeling of envy. A fireman! That was a job worth having. He wondered if, when he went to call on Toby, he would be allowed to crawl all over the fire engine; he should like that.

‘Yes, by Jove, he is. You said that so funnily! Do it again.’

‘By Jove,’ muttered Francis, grinning with delight.

‘By Jove. I never heard anyone say it before, except on the pictures. You hate yourself, don’t you? Have a few flowers.’

And she held the pale purple tulips and wallflowers just under his nose. Any other girl would have clumsily jammed them into his face, but Toby put them up delicately, half withdrawing the bouquet even as she offered it. All her movements were like that; neat, self-confident, poised to the verge of grace.

‘I say, my name’s Francis Garden. May I know yours?’

‘Mae Kellett. Mae with an e. Don’t say it!’