‘I assure you that it is not necessary. There’s one thing though, Mrs Denman, that I would very much like to know.’

‘Yes?’

‘How did you come across Mr Quin?’

‘He is often down here,’ she said slowly. ‘I think he owns land in this part of the world.’

‘He does, he does. He told me so this afternoon,’ said Mr Satterthwaite.

‘He is—’ She paused. Her eyes met Mr Satterthwaite’s. ‘I think you know what he is better than I do,’ she finished.

‘I?’

‘Is it not so?’

He was troubled. His neat little soul found her disturbing. He felt that she wished to force him further than he was prepared to go, that she wanted him to put into words that which he was not prepared to admit to himself.

‘You know!’ she said. ‘I think you know most things, Mr Satterthwaite.’

Here was incense, yet for once it failed to intoxicate him. He shook his head in unwonted humility.

‘What can anyone know?’ he asked. ‘So little—so very little.’

She nodded in assent. Presently she spoke again, in a queer brooding voice, without looking at him.

‘Supposing I were to tell you something—you would not laugh? No, I do not think you would laugh. Supposing, then, that to carry on one’s’—she paused—‘one’s trade, one’s profession, one were to make use of a fantasy—one were to pretend to oneself something that did not exist—that one were to imagine a certain person … It is a pretence, you understand, a make believe—nothing more. But one day—’

‘Yes?’ said Mr Satterthwaite.

He was keenly interested.

‘The fantasy came true! The thing one imagined—the impossible thing, the thing that could not be—was real! Is that madness? Tell me, Mr Satterthwaite. Is that madness—or do you believe it too?’

‘I—’ Queer how he could not get the words out. How they seemed to stick somewhere at the back of his throat.

‘Folly,’ said Anna Denman. ‘Folly.’

She swept out of the room and left Mr Satterthwaite with his confession of faith unspoken.

He came down to dinner to find Mrs Denman entertaining a guest, a tall dark man approaching middle age.

‘Prince Oranoff—Mr Satterthwaite.’

The two men bowed. Mr Satterthwaite had the feeling that some conversation had been broken off on his entry which would not be resumed. But there was no sense of strain. The Russian conversed easily and naturally on those objects which were nearest to Mr Satterthwaite’s heart. He was a man of very fine artistic taste, and they soon found that they had many friends in common. John Denman joined them, and the talk became localized. Oranoff expressed regret for the accident.

‘It was not my fault. I like to drive fast—yes, but I am a good driver. It was Fate—chance’—he shrugged his shoulders—‘the masters of all of us.’