It was the Assistant Commissioner at the Yard. Troy listened to him with a hammer knocking at her throat. He thought, he said with arch obscurity, that she might enjoy a run up to London on Monday. If she stayed the night, the Yard might have something of interest to show her on Tuesday morning. A police car would be coming in by way of Ancreton Halt early on Monday and would be delighted to give her a lift. ‘Thank you,’ said Troy in an unrecognizable voice. ‘Yes, I see. Yes, of course. Yes, very exciting. Thank you.’

She fled to her room, realizing as she sat breathless on her bed that she had run like a madwoman up three flights of stairs. ‘It’s as well,’ she thought, ‘that the portrait’s finished. In this frame of mind I’d be lucky if I reached Panty’s form.’

She began distractedly to imagine their meeting. ‘But I can’t see his face,’ she thought in a panic. ‘I can’t remember his voice. I’ve forgotten my husband.’

She felt by turns an unreasonable urge for activity and a sense of helpless inertia. Ridiculous incidents from the Ancred repertoire flashed up in her mind. ‘I must remember to tell him that,’ she would think, and then wonder if, after all, the Ancreds in retrospect would sound funny. She remembered with a jolt that she must let Katti Bostock know about Tuesday. They had arranged for Alleyn’s old servant to go to London and open the flat.

‘I should have done it at once,’ she cried, and returned downstairs. While she waited, fuming, in a little telephone-room near the front doors, for her call to go through, she heard wheels on the drive, the sound of voices, and finally the unmistakable rumpus of arrival in the hall. A charming voice called gaily: ‘Milly, where are you? Come down. It’s Dessy and Thomas and me. Dessy found a Colonel, and the Colonel had a car, and we’ve all arrived together.’

‘Jenetta!’ Millamant’s disembodied voice floated down from the gallery. Still more distantly Pauline’s echoed her: ‘Jenetta!’

Was there an overtone of disapproval, not quite of dismay, in this greeting, Troy wondered, as she quietly shut the door?

Jenetta, the Hon Mrs Claude Ancred, unlike Millamant, had caught none of the overtones of her relations-in-law. She was a nice-looking woman, with a gay voice, good clothes, an intelligent face, and an air of quietly enjoying herself. Her conversation was unstressed and crisp. If she sensed internecine warfare she gave no hint of doing so, and seemed to be equally pleased with, and equally remote from, each member of that unlikely clan.