She felt as if she was running – running away – and they were just behind her, gaining on her, catching up with her, capturing her – and she could not escape.

She knew what the fox must feel with a pack of hounds behind him. She was like a stag speeding over the moors and yet conscious all the time that his lifespan was limited.

She raised her head. There was still only silence and the darkness of the room.

Carina threw herself down and buried her face in the pillow.

“Leave me alone,” she whispered. “Please, please, leave me alone – ”

She thought in the night that she would never sleep.

*

But the housemaid knocking on the door at eight o’clock woke her from a deep slumber that made her feel that it was a tremendous effort to cross the room and unlock the door.

“Good mornin’, miss, it’s a lovely day,” the housemaid said cheerily. “It rained a bit in the night, but the sun’s out now.”

‘It must have rained after he had gone away,’ Carina thought and wondered how she could have fallen asleep, even though she had known that it was impossible for him to enter the room.

“Thank you,” she managed to say with a smile to the housemaid as she set an early-morning cup of tea by the side of the bed.

As soon as the girl had gone, Carina jumped up and slipped on her dressing gown and went into the next room.

Dipa was sitting cross-legged on his bed surrounded by soldiers, bricks and books, in fact almost everything that was movable from the toy shelf.

“Dipa wake, but not wake Missie!” he crowed triumphantly.

There was something in the ease with which he said this sentence that told Carina all too clearly that it had been impressed on him very forcibly that, while he could do whatever he liked, he was not to wake other people.

She had a sudden vision of the sick woman, dragging this child half across the world in search of his father.

Chi-Yun had been ill. She had either to work or to find men to pay for her and the one thing that had been important was that she should have been able to sleep.

Dipa had learned this lesson well, if none other.

“You are a very good boy,” Carina told him. “Now let’s hurry and get dressed. Your breakfast will soon be ready.”

Dipa was content to let her wash and dress him. Then, telling him to take his toys into the nursery, Carina went into her own room.