There was a general feeling of relief that Irene had gone, and as Mrs Wyse’s excellent supper progressed, with its cold turkey and its fried slices of plum pudding, its toasted cheese and its figs stuffed with almonds sent by Amelia from Capri, the general numbness caused by the catastrophe began to pass off. Consumed with anxiety as all were for the two (especially one of them) who had vanished into the Channel fogs on so unusual a vehicle, they could not fail to recognise what problems of unparalleled perplexity and interest were involved in what all still hoped might not turn out to be a tragedy. But whether it proved so or not, the whole manner of these happenings, the cause, the conditions, the circumstances which led to the two unhappy ladies whisking by on the flood must be discussed, and presently Major Benjy broke into this unnatural reticence.

‘I’ve seen many floods on the Jumna,’ he said, refilling his glass of port, ‘but I never saw one so sudden and so – so fraught with enigmas. They must have been in the kitchen. Now we all know there was a Christmas tree there –’

A conversational flood equal to the largest ever seen on the Jumna was unloosed; a torrent of conjectures, and reconstruction after reconstruction of what could have occurred to produce what they had all seen, was examined and rejected as containing some inherent impossibility. And then what did the gallant Lucia’s final words mean, when she said, ‘Just wait till we come back’? By now discussion had become absolutely untrammelled, the rivalry between the two, Miss Mapp’s tricks and pointless meannesses, Lucia’s scornful victories, and, no less, her domineering ways were openly alluded to.

‘But “Just wait till we come back” is what we’re talking about,’ cried Diva. ‘We must keep to the point, Major Benjy. I believe she simply meant “Don’t give up hope. We shall come back.” And I’m sure they will.’

‘No, there’s more in it than that,’ said Georgie, interrupting. ‘I know Lucia better than any of you. She meant that she had something frightfully interesting to tell us when she did come back, as of course she will, and I’d bet it was something about Elizabeth. Some new thing she’d found her out in.’

‘But at such a solemn moment,’ said the Padre, again forgetting his pseudo-Highland origin, ‘when they were being whirled out to sea with death staring them in the face, I hardly think that such trivialities as those which had undoubtedly before caused between those dear ladies the frictions which we all deplored –’

‘Nonsense, Kenneth,’ said his wife, rather to his relief, for he did not know how he was to get out of this sentence, ‘you enjoyed those rows as much as anybody.’