By this time Harry was in a state of high excitement. He was fingering the Nigg Stone at his neck. Sweat ran down the deep furrows in his cheeks. Even his grey hair, swept up and back now in the style of the more old-fashioned of the two Everly Brothers, glistened with perspiration. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person more in his element. Fire flashed at us from each of his old red eyes. But it was Camilla he was looking at. It was Camilla he wanted to inflame with his secret. ‘She’s under age,’ he told her, in a voice rich with phlegm.

Actually, Harry wasn’t involved in quite so much criminality as he wanted us to believe. Avice was only marginally younger than she ought to have been, and in another two and a half years would be able to accompany Harry to the pub with impunity. As for the trouble he was in, well it was true that Avice’s parents had kicked up a bit of a stink when Harry had first started paying her serious attentions – she was thirteen and a day then – but they had got used to him, and since Avice was not making much progress at school they could think of no really positive reasons why Harry shouldn’t carry her off to Castle Boterel. The thorough unpleasantness of her personality might have contributed to their open-mindedness also. It certainly contributed to that of the community of spell-casters into which, once Harry felt relaxed about letting her out of the house, she was thrown. Nothing could have been more touching than the sweetness which those nicely brought up girls in their painstaking plaits and vegetable-dyed cardigans showed to Harry’s under-age girlfriend as she ran through all their menfolk, disrupting their rural quiet, entirely misconstruing their principles of hospitality and sharing. ‘It’s simply that she’s in too much of a hurry,’ I remember Clemency Fanshawe saying to Camilla and me, as she sat, beatific, with her loom between her knees. ‘Once she understands that everything she wants will be here for a long time, that no one is going to take it away from her, then I’m sure she’ll be all right.’ ‘Perhaps she just wants to be with some younger men,’ I suggested. I promise, on the Bible, that I wasn’t offering that as a criticism of anybody, least of all Harry. I knew what one could and couldn’t say in Clemency’s company. But apparently I’d gone too far. ‘Nobody is younger than Harry,’ she reproved me.