Here she hooted, and several of the photographs shot out in yellow abandon. When she had stooped, and strained, and risen purpler, she exploded:

‘There! You wouldn’t believe! Now would you? I ask! Or would you?’

Two or three contiguous ladies craned old, felted necks, but did not dare give an opinion. Opinions had wilted for the most part at the Sundown Home. Though the ladies were interested enough to see what was indeed a peculiar phenomenon: the young, velvety girl, with butterfly bow restraining her fall of hair, the nice lace collar on the gentle bosom, the modest, crocheted sleevelets standing starched on the supple arms. The peculiar thing about it was, the ladies saw, the girl in the photograph could have been Miss Docker before the wind of time blew her up over-lifesize.

‘There must have been a great deal we didn’t understand,’ Miss Docker decided, scratching with a thumb-nail at something on the girl’s face. ‘Young girls like that! We must have been real ignorant.’ She shrieked to think of it ‘Well, we were! A lot of silly young things! Age, you see, has its compensations.’

But the silence ached in the ears of the inmates of the Sundown Home.

‘Can everybody see?’ Miss Docker asked, and frowned. The light is that dingy.’

‘Oh, yes. Well enough,’ said Mrs Hibble.

Miss Docker hated Mrs Hibble. To say nothing of Mrs Hibble’s established, yet so shadowy friend. Then Miss Docker, squinting through the shadows, did at last begin to see enough to put an end to anonymity.

‘Well!’ she cried. ‘Waddayaknow! Isn’t that Mrs Lillie? Mrs Millicent Lillie?’

The shadow stirred evasively.

‘I am Mrs Lillie,’ it admitted.

‘Well now, what a contrary thing! Not to make yourself known to a friend!’

‘It didn’t occur,’ said Mrs Lillie, ‘I thought there would be time enough.’

‘In a place like this, never leave undone. Wouldn’t you agree?’ Miss Docker looked around at the others. ‘Time can play tricks,’ she warned.

Mrs Lillie sat.

‘Who would believe,’ Miss Docker continued, ‘it is two – or is it three years? – since your poor husband passed on.’

Mrs Lillie continued to sit, evidently waiting for the moments to carry her out of reach. At her lowest she would even decide time was her only infallible protector. Her friend Mrs Hibble, they were silently agreed, could do nothing for her now.

‘Wait. As a matter of fact. I do believe,’ Miss Docker was saying, and scrabbling. ‘It couldn’t be coincidence, could it? There is a snapshot. Somewhere. There!’

She brandished, before settling to devour.

Mrs Lillie moistened her lips.

‘Tom and Millie Lillie.’

Again Mrs Lillie wet her lips. Never had Miss Docker referred to them with less respect. Was time, after all, the infallible protector?

‘And there is Me!’ Miss Docker pointed. ‘Holding his hand, He had begun to need attention. That was after the first stroke. Do you remember how I would come in? Voluntarily. I was never one to refuse assistance to anybody who needed it. Was I?’ Miss Docker asked.