Inside the house it was like old Mrs. Fisherton’s, full of furniture old-fashioned even when the Houghtons were young. There was a smell of old fabrics never washed or cleaned, of stuffiness and of substances used to keep away moths. If you’re an untidy housekeeper in London, if you don’t clear up crumbs and put away food at night, mice will come. They had come to Mrs. Houghton’s kitchen. I recognized their traces from the signs left behind by Liv’s mice. One, or several, of them, having eaten the crumbs, had gone to work chewing up a cookbook. I watered the already dry and drooping ivy and cissus and maidenhair fern, and then I went outside to treat the lawn with hormone broad-leaf weedkiller and grass seed.

Silver came for me at four. I asked him about Wim and the Houghtons’ roof.

“I don’t know. I suppose you have to apply the Golden Rule.”

“What’s the Golden Rule?”

“Do as you would be done by. You ask yourself: if you owned a house, would you mind your gardener taking a friend in to get out of your window and climb on your roof. You wouldn’t and I wouldn’t, but would you if you were seventy and scared of burglars and whatever?”

“You mean, better not?”

“Better not,” he said. “I feel I’m growing old when I say that”—and almost petulantly—“I’m sick of people making me an oracle on morals. What do I know?”

The way he spoke did a lot to restore my faith in him. I took his advice. But just the same my belief that everything he said came from some fount of integrity and wisdom was shaken. He had read my letter. I realized that if I had been asked by someone who didn’t know him for a sketch of his character I’d have described him as being as unlikely to read someone’s private correspondence as to steal their wallet. And, though this is the melodramatic way of putting things Silver so disliked, the poison seeped into other areas of our life. Up till then I had believed entirely in the rightness of what we were doing for the people in 4E. But that day, as we walked home to Russia Road, the doubts began. I didn’t voice them. I told no one. But I set them down in my diary.