Aunt Katherine appeared again suddenly.

She had a trick of seeming to materialise out of space. Perhaps she had caught the trick of it from many of the spiritualistic seances she attended.

"Supper," she said, rather breathlessly, and added, parenthetically, "I think it's better than calling it dinner. People don't expect so much. Everything's very difficult, isn't it? Mary Lewis tells me she slips the fishman ten shillings every other week. I think that's immoral."

Dr Lionel Cloade was giving his irritable nervous laugh as he talked to Frances Cloade.

"Oh, come, Frances," he said. "You can't expect me to believe you really think that - let's go in."

They went into the shabby and rather ugly dining-room. Jeremy and Frances, Lionel and Katherine, Adela, Lynn and Rowley. A family party of Cloades - with two outsiders. For Rosaleen Cloade, though she bore the name, had not become a Cloade as Frances and Katherine had done.

She was the stranger, ill at ease, nervous.

And David - David was the outlaw.

By necessity, but also by choice, Lynn was thinking these things as she took her place at the table.

There were waves in the air of feeling - a strong electrical current of - what was it? Hate? Could it really be hate? Something at any rate - destructive.

Lynn thought suddenly, "But that's what's the matter everywhere. I've noticed it ever since I got home. It's the aftermath war has left. Ill will. Ill feeling. It's everywhere. On railways and buses and in shops and amongst workers and clerks and even agricultural labourers. And I suppose worse in mines and factories. Ill will. But here it's more than that. Here it's particular. It's mean."

And she thought, shocked: "Do we hate them so much? These strangers who have taken what we think is ours?"

And then - "No, not yet. We might - but not yet. No, it's they who hate us."

It seemed to her so overwhelming a discovery that she sat silent thinking about it and forgetting to talk to David Hunter who was sitting beside her.

Presently he said: "Thinking out something?"

His voice was quite pleasant, slightly amused, but she felt conscience- stricken. He might think that she was going out of her way to be ill- mannered.

She said, "I'm sorry. I was having thoughts about the state of the world."

David said coolly, "How extremely unoriginal!"

"Yes, it is rather. We are all so earnest nowadays. And it doesn't seem to do much good either."

"It is usually more practical to wish to do harm. We've thought up one or two rather practical gadgets in that line during the last few years - including that piece de resistance, the Atom Bomb."

"That was what I was thinking about - oh, I don't mean the Atom Bomb. I meant ill will. Definite practical ill will."

David said calmly:

"Ill will certainly - but I rather take issue to the word practical. They were more practical about it in the Middle Ages."