Without answering he produced a small portfolio which he silently thrust at her. It contained many more sketches. Although Nurse Kettle knew nothing about pictures, she did, she maintained, know what she liked. And she liked these very much indeed. They were direct statements of facts and she awarded them direct statements of approval and was about to shut the portfolio when a sketch that had faced the wrong way round caught her attention. She turned it over. It was of a woman lying on a chaise-longue smoking a cigarette in a jade holder. A bougainvillaea flowered in the background.

‘Why,’ Nurse Kettle ejaculated. ‘Why, that’s Mrs Cartarette!’

If Syce had made some kind of movement to snatch the sketch from her he checked himself before it was completed. He said very rapidly: ‘Party. Met her Far East. Shore leave. Forgotten all about it.’

‘That would be before they were married, wouldn’t it?’ Nurse Kettle remarked with perfect simplicity. She shut the portfolio, said: ‘You know, I believe you could make my picture-map of Swevenings.’ And told him of her great desire for one. When she got up and collected her belongings he, too, rose, but with an ejaculation of distress.

‘I see I haven’t made a job of you yet,’ she remarked. ‘Same time tomorrow suit you?’

‘Admirably,’ he said. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ He gave her one of his rare painful smiles and watched her as she walked down the path towards his spinney. It was now a quarter to nine.

VI

Nurse Kettle had left her bicycle in the village where she was spending the evening with the Women’s Institute. She therefore took the River Path. Dusk had fallen over the valley of the Chyne and as she descended into it her own footfall sounded unnaturally loud on the firm turf. Thump, thump, thump she went, down the hillside. Once, she stopped dead, tilted her head and listened. From behind her at Uplands, came the not-unfamiliar sound of a twang followed by a sharp penetrating blow. She smiled to herself and walked on. Only desultory rural sounds disturbed the quiet of nightfall. She could actually hear the cool voice of the stream.

She did not cross Bottom Bridge but followed a rough path along the right bank of the Chyne, past a group of alders and another of willows. This second group, extending in a sickle-shaped mass from the water’s edge into Bottom Meadow rose up vapourishly in the dusk. She could smell willow-leaves and wet soil. As sometimes happens when we are solitary, she had the sensation of being observed but she was not a fanciful woman and soon dismissed this feeling.

‘It’s turned much cooler,’ she thought.