Fenella laughed uncomfortably and Paul hastily backed away. ‘Where are you off to?’ he asked loudly.

‘To remind Miss Able it’s time to come in. Those poor children work so hard. I can’t feel—however. I’m afraid I’m rather old-fashioned, Mrs Alleyn. I still feel a mother knows best.’

‘Well, but Mother,’ Paul objected, ‘something had to be done about Panty, didn’t it? I mean, she really was pretty frightful.’

‘Poor old Panty!’ said Mrs Kentish bitterly.

‘We’d better move on, Aunt Pauline,’ Fenella said. ‘Cedric is driving up. He won’t do anything about unloading if I know him.’

‘Cedric!’ Mrs Kentish repeated. ‘T’uh!’

She smiled rather grandly at Troy and left them.

‘My mother,’ Paul said uncomfortably, ‘gets in a bit of a flap about things. Doesn’t she, Fen?’

‘Actually,’ said Fenella, ‘they all do. That generation, I mean. Daddy rather wallows in emotion and Aunt Dessy’s a snorter at it. They get it from Grandfather, don’t you think?’

‘All except Thomas.’

‘Yes, all except Thomas. Don’t you think,’ Fenella asked Troy, ‘that if one generation comes in rather hot and strong emotionally, the next generation swings very much the other way? Paul and I are as hard as nails, aren’t we, Paul?’

Troy turned to the young man. He was staring fixedly at his cousin. His dark brows were knitted and his lips were pressed together. He looked preternaturally solemn and did not answer Fenella. ‘Why,’ thought Troy, ‘he’s in love with her.’

The interior of Ancreton amply sustained the promise of its monstrous facade. Troy was to learn that ‘great’ was the stock adjective at Ancreton. There was the Great West Spinney, the Great Gallery and the Great Tower. Having crossed the Great Drawbridge over the now dry and cultivated moat, Troy, Fenella, and Paul entered the Great Hall.

Here the tireless ingenuity of the architect had flirted with a number of Elizabethan conceits. There was a plethora of fancy carving, a display of stained-glass windows bearing the Ancred arms, and a number of presumably collateral quarterings. Between these romped occasional mythical animals, and, when mythology and heraldry had run short, the Church had not been forgotten, for crosslets-ancred stood cheek-by-jowl in mild confusion with the keys of St Peter and the Cross of St John of Jerusalem.

Across the back of the hall, facing the entrance, ran a minstrels’ gallery, energetically chiselled and hung at intervals with banners. Beneath this, on a wall whose surface was a mass of scrolls and bosses, the portrait, Fenella explained, was to hang. By day, as Troy at once noticed, it would be chequered all over with the reflected colours of a stained-glass heraldry and would take on the aspect of a jig-saw puzzle. By night, according to Paul, it would be floodlit by four lamps specially installed under the gallery.