He made two more attempts to communicate his horrible situation. To Mrs Brandy he delivered an odd defence of Judas Iscariot in which he declared that in all Iscariot’s last actions he was following the instructions of two men called John Copperhead and John Brassfoot whom Iscariot had believed to be angels; and to Toby Smith, Mrs Brandy’s shopman, he gave a list of all the people in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England who had been stolen away by fairies in the last two hundred years. None of them were people he had ever heard of.

Stephen was obliged to conclude that, try as he might, he could not speak of his enchantment.

The person who suffered most from his strange silences and dismal spirits was, without a doubt, Mrs Brandy. She did not understand that he had changed to the whole world, she only saw that he had changed towards her. One day at the beginning of September Stephen paid her a visit. They had not met for some weeks, which had made Mrs Brandy so unhappy that she had written to Robert Austin, and Robert had gone to Stephen and scolded him for his neglect. However once Stephen had arrived in the little parlour above the shop in St James’s-street, no one could have blamed Mrs Brandy if she had wished him immediately away again. He sat with his head in his hand, sighing heavily, and had nothing to say to her. She offered him Constantia-wine, marmalade, an old-fashioned wigg bun – all sorts of delicacies – but he refused them all. He wanted nothing; and so she sat down on the opposite side of the fire and resumed her needlework – a nightcap which she was despondently embroidering for him.

“Perhaps,” she said, “you are tired of London and of me, and you wish to return to Africa?”

“No,” said Stephen.

“I dare say Africa is a remarkably charming place,” said Mrs Brandy, who seemed determined to punish herself by sending Stephen immediately to Africa. “I have always heard that it is. With oranges and pineapples everywhere one looks, and sugar canes and chocolate trees.” She had laboured fourteen years in the grocery trade and had mapped out her world in its stock. She laughed bitterly. “It seems that I would fare very ill in Africa. What need have people of shops when they have only to stretch out their hand and pluck the fruit of the nearest tree? Oh, yes! I should be ruined in no time in Africa.” She snapped a thread between her teeth. “Not that I should not be glad to go tomorrow,” She poked the thread viciously into the needle’s innocent eye, “if any one were to ask me.”

“Would you go to Africa for my sake?” asked Stephen in surprize.

She looked up. “I would go any where for your sake,” she said. “I thought you knew that.”

They regarded one another unhappily.