Crunching always.

‘She was the archontissa,’ she explained. ‘I am a peasant. A servant. But have also done my duty as a wife. Because I loved her. I hope, I think she would not have disapproved. Not of everything.’

‘Is it long since Mrs Philippides died?’ Malliakas asked prudently.

‘Long? Oh, yes. How long? But long!’ The second Mrs Philippides sighed, as though the gap between then and now was too great for her to measure.

‘Her health, it appears, was not of the best.’

‘Oh, it was not her health!’ Mrs Philippides answered. ‘The kyria died violently. Oh, violently! I had expected it.’

And suddenly the words began to slip from this peasant throat as never before, in bursts at first, then in bitter streams, so much so that the stranger himself was caught up, and whirled with her down from the upper storey, round the spiral, and into the street.

The maid running in her slippers. Slapping the marble stairs.

It was the hour of reddish summer dusk, which tightens round the skull. They stood shoulder to shoulder on the pavement. He could smell the anxiety of her strong but helpless peasant body.

‘Kyria mou! Kyria!’ the maid cried.

Then she stooped.

Her great buttocks were quivering in distress, her great breast would have given up its breath.

Bending over the figure in the gutter.

Constantia Philippides was just able to move her head. Her body was broken, though, which the maid arranged under the tumbled gown. It was still too soon for anyone to have gathered, excepting a dog, and the two ladies from the ground floor.

‘Aglaia,’ Constantia began, issuing her order against that little trickle of darkening blood.

To the maid kneeling, rocking.

‘Kyria! Ach, kyria mou! What shall we do now? But what shall we do?’

Rocking and lamenting, already in her black.

‘I am glad, Aglaia,’ said Constantia Philippides, ‘that you will never break. Never. You must never!’ Then, when she had risen for a moment, above the mounting tide of blood: ‘I am the one, you see, who broke.’

A policeman carried her up the stairs, though the maid would have attempted it.

When it was over, the two figures walking through the passive landscape had almost reached the bus stop.

‘You won’t miss it. Although the Swiss are punctual,’ Mrs Philippides reassured.

She was again herself – decent, stolid, and composed.

‘It is good the kyrios talked to you,’ she said. ‘It must have pleased him. There is so little to interest him now.’

Then she paused, thinking, as some of her anxiety returned.

‘You know,’ she said, in quick, panting whispers, ‘it is the last of the glasses – and if it breaks, what shall I do? I shall have nothing left then.’

Suddenly Mrs Philippides halted, aware, it seemed, of her nakedness, and turned, and lumbered back, into the damp, choking garden. Nor did Malliakas find the courage to watch her go. There was the bus, besides. Regular and Swiss. He ran to mount. Away from silence. Smiling tautly. He could not have endured it if called upon to listen to a last shivering of glass.