From behind the mask against Nurse Kettle’s shoulder came a stutter. ‘Vic – Vic … Vic,’ as if the pulse that was soon to run down had become semi-articulate like a clock. They looked at each other in dismay.

‘What is it?’ Lady Lacklander asked. ‘What is it, Hal?’

‘Somebody called Vic?’ Nurse Kettle suggested brightly.

‘There is nobody called Vic,’ said George Lacklander, and sounded impatient. ‘For God’s sake, Mark, can’t you help him?’

‘In a moment,’ Mark said from the far end of the room.

‘Vic …’

‘The Vicar?’ Lady Lacklander asked, pressing his hand and bending over him. ‘Do you want the Vicar to come, Hal?’

His eyes stared up into hers. Something like a smile twitched at the corners of the gaping mouth. The head moved slightly.

Mark came back with a syringe and gave the injection. After a moment Nurse Kettle turned away. There was something in her manner that gave definition to the scene. Lady Lacklander and her son and grandson drew closer to the bed. She had taken her husband’s hands again.

‘What is it, Hal? What is it, my dearest?’ she asked. ‘Is it the Vicar?’

With a distinctness that astonished them, he whispered: ‘After all, you never know.’ And with his gaze still fixed on his wife he then died.

II

On the late afternoon three days after his father’s funeral, Sir George Lacklander sat in the study at Nunspardon going through the contents of the files and the desk. He was a handsome man with a look of conventional distinction. He had been dark but was now grizzled in the most becoming way possible with grey wings at his temples and a plume above his forehead. Inevitably, his mouth was firm and the nose above it appropriately hooked. He was, in short, rather like an illustration of an English gentleman in an American magazine.

He had arrived at the dangerous age for such men, being now fifty years old and remarkably vigorous.