‘Ah, hell!’ muttered the Colonel. He crossed the bridge and passed out of sight of Jacob’s Cottage and continued on his way home.

The path crossed a narrow meadow and climbed the lower reach of Watt’s Hill. His own coppice and Commander Syce’s spinney concealed from the Colonel the upper portions of the three demesnes. Someone was coming down the path at a heavy jog-trot. He actually heard the wheezing and puffing of this person and recognized the form of locomotion practised by Mr Phinn before the latter appeared wearing an old Norfolk jacket and tweed hat which, in addition to being stuck about with trout-fishing flies, had Mr Phinn’s reading spectacles thrust through the band like an Irishman’s pipe. He was carrying his elaborate collection of fishing impediments. He had the air of having got himself together in a hurry and was attended by Mrs Thomasina Twitchett, who, after the manner of her kind, suggested that their association was purely coincidental.

The path was narrow. It was essential that someone should give way and the Colonel, sick of rows with his neighbours, stood on one side. Mr Phinn jogged glassily down upon him. The cat suddenly cantered ahead.

‘Hallo, old girl,’ said the Colonel. He stooped down and snapped a finger and thumb at her. She stared briefly and passed him with a preoccupied air, twitching the tip of her tail.

The Colonel straightened up and found himself face to face with Mr Phinn.

‘Good evening,’ said the Colonel.

‘Sir,’ said Mr Phinn. He touched his dreadful hat with one finger, blew out his cheeks and advanced. ‘Thomasina,’ he added, ‘hold your body more seemly.’

For Thomasina, waywardly taken with the Colonel, had returned and rolled on her back at his feet.

‘Nice cat,’ said the Colonel, and added: ‘Good fishing to you. The Old ’Un lies below the bridge on my side, by the way.’

‘Indeed?’

‘As no doubt you guessed,’ the Colonel added against his better judgement, ‘when you watched me through your field-glasses.’

If Mr Phinn had contemplated a conciliatory position he at once abandoned it. He made a belligerent gesture with his net. ‘The landscape, so far as I am aware,’ he said, ‘is not under some optical interdict. It may be viewed, I believe. To the best of my knowledge, there are no squatter’s rights over the distant prospect of the Chyne.’

‘None whatever. You can stare,’ said the Colonel, ‘at the Chyne, or me or anything else you fancy till you are black in the face for all I care. But if you realized … If you …’ He scratched his head, a gesture that with the Colonel denoted profound emotional disturbance. ‘My dear Phinn …’ he began again, ‘if you only knew … God bless my soul what does it matter! Good evening to you.’

He encircled Mr Phinn and hurried up the path. ‘And for that grotesque,’ he thought resentfully, ‘for that impossible, that almost certifiable buffoon I have saddled myself with a responsibility that may well make me wretchedly uncomfortable for the rest of my life.’