‘Well, it was like your impertinence to interfere,’ he said. ‘What business was it of yours? Trying to hit a perfect stranger! You’re mad, I should think.’

‘Oh, go to hell,’ muttered Sophia, and walked away, while the young man, carefully talking to the dog to show that he was perfectly in control of his nerves and temper, strode off in another direction.

Sophia, stumbling through the twilight and crying in a choked angry way, gradually grew calm enough to grin reluctantly. She was still extremely angry about the moorhen, but the young man had looked so frightened when she flew at him, and she had so thoroughly upset his dignity that she felt she had not come off so badly. Beastly dago, she thought; he looked like a tailor’s dummy with that awful little moustache … never mind. I shouldn’t think he’ll set his beastly Brandy on moorhens again in a hurry.

She was, however, so soothed by a rich tea at the Primrose Café and a calm perusal of a copy of that morning’s Daily Mail which someone had left on her table, that she felt capable of telephoning Uncle Preston about half past six to ask him how the sale had gone?

Apparently it had gone rather well. Nothing of course had fetched anything approaching the amount which it was worth. That was only to be expected. Times were bad. Nevertheless things had not gone so badly. Not badly at all. ‘How much?’ asked Sophia baldly, trying to hold her breath, because she disliked the stuffy smell of the telephone booth.

Well … Uncle Preston had not, of course, the exact figures by him; he was in the middle of tea when the telephone bell rang; no, of course it did not matter at all, he just wanted Sophia to understand why he had not the figures by him.

‘But, Uncle Preston, you must have some idea?’ insisted his niece. ‘Don’t you even know about how much?’

Well, Uncle Preston hardly liked to say. It was not easy to be definite. He thought he might go so far as to say that things had not gone so badly, and then, of course, there was the car to be sold …

‘Does Aunt Maxine know how much?’ demanded Sophia, ‘I’ll ring her up, I think, and ask.’

Oh, there was no need to ask Maxine, none at all. He believed, though of course Sophia must realize that the figures were not exact, that the sale had realized about a hundred pounds. There had been one or two dealers there who had taken a fancy to some of poor Hartley’s bargains. The sitting room chairs had sold very well, he believed, and the little table inlaid with fruits in coloured woods … perhaps Sophia remembered it?

‘A hundred pounds. That’s pretty good, isn’t it? Uncle Preston, I suppose you didn’t notice who bought a little painting on a wooden panel. Quite small. It was a girl holding out an apple … I only wondered.’