‘Dear Lucia,’ she said, ‘I must be off. Just one little stroll, if I may, round my garden, before I go home. My roses will never forgive me, if I go away without noticing them.’

She was too late.

‘How I wish I had known it was finished!’ said Mr Wyse. ‘I should have begged you to allow us to have it for our Art Exhibition. It would have been the gem of it. Cruel of you, Mrs Lucas!’

‘But I sent it in to the hanging committee,’ said Lucia. ‘Georgie sent his, too, of Mallards. They were both sent back to us.’

Mr Wyse turned from the picture to Lucia with an expression of incredulous horror, and Miss Mapp quietly turned to stone.

‘But impossible,’ he said. ‘I am on the hanging committee myself, and I hope you cannot think I should have been such an imbecile. Susan is on the committee too: so is Miss Mapp. In fact, we are the hanging committee. Susan, that gem, that little masterpiece never came before us.’

‘Never,’ said Susan. ‘Never. Never, never.’

Mr Wyse’s eye transferred itself to Miss Mapp. She was still stone and her face was as white as the wall of Mallards Cottage in the masterpiece. Then for the first time in the collective memory of Tilling Mr Wyse allowed himself to use slang.

‘There has been some hanky-panky,’ he said. ‘That picture never came before the hanging committee.’

The stone image could just move its eyes and they looked, in a glassy manner, at Lucia. Lucia’s met them with one short gimlet thrust, and she whisked round to Georgie. Her face was turned away from the others, and she gave him a prodigious wink, as he sat there palpitating with excitement.

‘Georgino mio,’ she said. ‘Let us recall exactly what happened. The morning, I mean, when the hanging committee met. Let me see: let me see. Don’t interrupt me: I will get it all clear.’

Lucia pressed her hands to her forehead.

‘I have it,’ she said. ‘It is perfectly vivid to me now. You had taken our little pictures down to the framer’s, Georgie, and told him to send them in to Elizabeth’s house direct. That was it. The errand boy from the framer’s came up here that very morning, and delivered mine to Grosvenor, and yours to Foljambe. Let me think exactly when that was. What time was it, Mr Wyse, that the hanging committee met?’

‘At twelve, precisely,’ said Mr Wyse.