“O.K. If there’s anything wrong with it, it’s too late to do anything about it now. Wish me luck.”

She smiled. “I told you he’d come round in the end.”

As I left the room I blew her a kiss; she put two fingers to her lips and then, surprisingly, coloured a little. I made a resolve to keep a tighter rein on myself; particularly since Norah had left Warley a week ago, these gestures of affection between Hilda and myself had become more and more frequent. This was no time to become entangled with my secretary, or indeed anyone else.

Middridge was standing by the desk when I went into Brown’s office. He didn’t speak, but gave me a brief nod. He was wearing a light grey suit which seemed to make him taller than usual, to bring him up from the diminutive to the merely small. He had worked for Brown’s for more than thirty years, never doing anything not in accordance with the principles of sound accountancy and never doing anything original or far-sighted either. In addition to everything else he lived in Warley and was a lay preacher and consequently not only knew all about me but was bound to disapprove of all he knew.

I nodded back to him and drew up a chair to the desk. Brown looked up from a page of handwritten figures. They were neat and small and in green ink; even upside down I recognized them as Middridge’s.

“I agree,” he said to Middridge. “But our young friend here had me worried for a moment.”

Middridge smiled. He had a small pursed mouth in a large square face; there was so little of the mouth that you had to watch carefully for the smile. But this morning it was so broad that it was as if it had been doubled to half the normal size. There was no doubt that he was pleased with himself.

“Mr. Lampton is a little impetuous,” he said. “We older ones have learned to look before we leap.”

His voice had two tones: one was the professional man’s, quiet and precise, the other the lay preacher’s, booming and unc­tuous. He was using the preacher’s voice now.

“We’ve been working out costs, Mr. Middridge and I,” Brown said. “I worked out some figures myself at the week-end, and they seemed a bit different from yours. But I’m not an accountant, I may well be wrong. I go by my instincts, you see. I’m just a rough ignorant business man . . .”

“Those figures aren’t final—”

He slapped my report down on the desk.

“Not final? Then what the hell’s the good of this document?”