Towards the end of February Jonathan had received a letter from Miles Obury. Obury proposed to stay at a hotel in Cirencester, but asked to be made free of Groaning Spinney so that he could continue his badger-watching. It was time for the cubs, he pointed out, and although he had some excellent and quite remarkable pictures of adult badgers, he had none of the youngsters. He added that Mansell would be staying in the neighbourhood also, for he had permission to make a trial trench in the mound at Cissington to find out whether a summer dig there would be valuable.

Jonathan groaned, and tossed the letter to his wife.

‘Oh, bother!’ said she. ‘I suppose we must ask them to stay here. I wouldn’t mind if the food weren’t such a business. They’ll have to exist on Mrs Humper’s chickens, that’s all!’

‘No, I’m not going to ask them to stay,’ said Jonathan, with spirited inhospitality. ‘I’m damned if I am. Could you manage a couple of lunches, and perhaps a dinner? And I’m damned if I’m going to ask Tiny. After all, they were more Bill’s pals than his. Look here, don’t let’s ask them at all.’

‘Oh, I expect we can manage,’ said Deborah. ‘It’s really breakfast that’s the worst. People always expect a cooked one in other people’s houses! So long as they’re not here for that!’

Miles Obury’s first task on the day which followed his arrival at the inn, not in Cirencester, after all, and distant only three miles or so from the manor house, was to reconstruct, with the aid of the suspected changeling, Farmer Daventry’s carter Ed Brown, the platform in the tree from which to take his flashlight photographs.

It was Jonathan who had recommended Ed.

‘If there are any badger cubs, they’ll probably amble out and climb all over Ed,’ he had observed. ‘And, if they don’t, at least he won’t frighten them away!’

He said nothing of Will North’s theories about the extra snow, and Obury and Ed made the platform safe again for the spring and summer, and, greatly to Obury’s joy, on the second day he was there he saw two cubs gambolling outside the sett in broad daylight. The early light of the year was not very good from a photographer’s point of view, but he got what he hoped would be a reasonably clear picture, and presented Ed with five shillings.

A robin, which, in the friendly manner common to his species, had followed the proceedings from a very short distance away, flew up to Ed and perched upon his shoulder. Jonathan, who was with the two men, laughed aloud, but the robin was not alarmed.