Nurse Kettle did a tentative back-pedal and started to wriggle her foot out of one of the interstices in Mr Phinn’s garden gate. He disengaged a sated kitten from its mother and rubbed it against his illshaven cheek.

‘Is he conscious?’ he asked.

‘Off and on. Bit confused. There now! Gossiping again! Talking of gossip,’ said Nurse Kettle, with a twinkle, ‘I see the Colonel’s out for the evening rise.’

An extraordinary change at once took place in Mr Phinn. His face became suffused with purple, his eyes glittered and he bared his teeth in a canine grin.

‘A hideous curse upon his sport,’ he said. ‘Where is he?’

‘Just below the bridge.’

‘Let him venture a handspan above it and I’ll report him to the authorities. What fly has he mounted? Has he caught anything?’

‘I couldn’t see,’ said Nurse Kettle, already regretting her part in the conversation, ‘from the top of Watt’s Hill.’

Mr Phinn replaced the kitten.

‘It is a dreadful thing to say about a fellow-creature,’ he said, ‘a shocking thing. But I do say advisedly and deliberately that I suspect Colonel Cartarette of having recourse to improper practices.’

It was Nurse Kettle’s turn to blush.

‘I am sure I don’t know to what you refer,’ she said.

‘Bread! Worms!’ said Mr Phinn, spreading his arms. ‘Anything! Tickling, even! I’d put it as low as that.’

‘I’m sure you’re mistaken.’

‘It is not my habit, Miss Kettle, to mistake the wanton extravagances of infatuated humankind. Look, if you will, at Cartarette’s associates. Look, if your stomach is strong enough to sustain the experience, at Commander Syce.’

‘Good gracious me, what has the poor Commander done!’

‘That man,’ Mr Phinn said, turning pale and pointing with one hand to the mother-cat and with the other in the direction of the valley; ‘that intemperate filibuster, who divides his leisure between alcohol and the idiotic pursuit of archery, that wardroom cupid, my God, murdered the mother of Thomasina Twitchett.’

‘Not deliberately, I’m sure.’

‘How can you be sure?’

Mr Phinn leant over his garden gate and grasped the handlebars of Nurse Kettle’s bicycle. The tassel of his smoking-cap fell over his face and he blew it impatiently aside. His voice began to trace the pattern of a much-repeated, highly relished narrative.