‘Wasn’t North sick?’

‘Oh, I think she was, a bit; I expect she hoped she’d get something, but he shut her up when she said wouldn’t he think it over. Bailey and Strang thought it was rather rough on you and me; they said so, after he’d gone to bed.’

‘I hate Strang. Soapy beast,’ said Sophia, meditatively. ‘So you’ve had it all this time?’

‘Yes.’

Neither Sophia nor Harry said, ‘I wonder Father trusted you with it,’ because the thought did not occur to them. Some element in Sophia’s silence, her bent head and gaze fixed on her folded hands in their shabby gloves, struck Francis; and he said awkwardly, ‘You aren’t hurt that I didn’t tell you about it, are you, dear?’

‘Well, I am, but only a very little bit, and I shall soon get over it so don’t worry. I’m not easily hurt. At least, I should be only I’m so terrified of getting like Uncle Preston.’

‘My god, yes,’ said Harry feelingly, and added, looking out of the window into the fog, ‘I say, where are we going?’

‘To see Celia,’ explained Sophia, ‘Oh, bother, I promised we’d take in some food, and now we’ve gone past Eddy Creab-the-Notorious-Gangster; I never noticed.’

‘Eddy Creab would be shut anyway, it’s nearly five o’clock, and I’m not hungry,’ said Harry.

‘I know, but the Deedle and I are; we were too afraid and polite to eat much lunch. Never mind, we’ll eat everything Celia’s got; she can always have bread and marmalade for her breakfast; she likes it.’

Eddy-Creab-the-Notorious-Gangster was their name for an old woman who kept a little general shop in Enbury Heath, which she never seemed to shut except for two hours on Sunday afternoons. Her shop was a proper village store, which sold everything from tinned salmon to packets of cauliflower seeds, and Celia and Sophia had found it very useful in their ill-organized but regal housekeeping, until the awful day when Eddy Creab had refused to trust Celia (whom she had known since Celia was a child of six) for a halfpenny.

Celia was terribly insulted and had sworn she would never enter Eddy Creab’s shop again; and the faith of the young Gardens in Eddy Creab was much shaken by this incident, although they continued to buy things from her.

She was called Eddy-Creab-the-Notorious-Gangster because she had adenoids and when she asked you if you wanted any cream today that was what it sounded like. Eddy Creab sounded exactly, the Gardens thought, like a notorious gangster, and that was how they referred to her. They could never remember her real name, which was written over the shop.

The taxi came to four shillings. Sophia and Francis deplored this, but Harry said, feeling in his pocket, ‘Never mind, we’ve got three thousand pounds,’ and for the next year he was to act comfortably on this assumption.

But Sophia was not feeling at all comfortable, as the three walked up the narrow lane between old cottages to Celia’s house. At the other end of the lane she could see a darkness, which she knew was the Heath, chilly and silent and smelling of sodden leaves under the heavy fog. Celia lived in one of the two old villages of Enbury Heath, which had been isolated hamlets a hundred years ago. Now wide roads ran past them, leading to sprawling new suburbs, but if a walker turned aside down any of the tiny lanes in Enbury Heath he came to weather-boarded houses, cottages, and gardens with old trees which had scarcely changed since Keats looked up at them.