‘And are you certain it was one of our dogs?’

‘Rather too certain. Don’t you remember how Fedri and I once painted their ears green?’

‘And this one had green ears too?’ pursued her father, who was sometimes rather slow-thinking.

‘Yes, green ears,’ replied Giorgina. ‘Of course the colour’s faded a bit by now.’

Once more her mother interrupted. ‘But listen,’ she said with exaggerated politeness, ‘do you really find these stone dogs so interesting? Excuse me for saying so, Stefano, but I really can’t see that there’s any need to make such a fuss about it …’

From outside – just behind the curtain, it almost seemed – there sounded a prolonged and muffled roar, mingling with the sound of the rain.

‘Did you hear that?’ exclaimed Signor Gron promptly. ‘Did you hear it?’

‘Thunder, what else? Just thunder. It’s no good, Stefano, you’re always so jumpy on rainy days,’ his wife hastened to explain.

They were all quiet, but the silence could not last long. Some unfamiliar thought, foreign to that aristocratic household, seemed to have crept into the dimly lit room and settled there.

‘Found it down by the river,’ commented the father, returning to the subject of the dogs. ‘How could it have got there? It couldn’t have flown.’

‘And why not?’ enquired Martora jovially.

‘Why not what, doctor?’ asked Signora Maria, nervously, since she did not usually like the pleasantries their old friend tended to make.

‘I meant: why should the statue not have flown? The river flows about twenty yards below it, that’s all.’

‘What a world we live in,’ sighed Maria Gron, trying once again to change the subject, as though the dogs were a cover for something more unpalatable. ‘First we have flying statues, and then do you know what the paper says here: ‘a new breed of talking fish discovered off the island of Java’.’

‘It also says: ‘Save time’,’ Fedri added rather foolishly – he too was looking at a paper.

‘What, what did you say?’ asked his father, who had not understood, but was generally apprehensive.

‘Yes, it says here: ‘Save time! Time too should figure on the budget sheet of every good businessman, on the credit or debit side, as the case may be.’’

‘I think you might have saved your own in this case,’ murmured Martora, though plainly amused.

At this point, somewhere beyond the curtain, a bell rang: so someone had braved this treacherous night, had broken the barrier of rain that was pouring down, hammering on the roofs, devouring great chunks out of the riverbanks; for fine trees were falling noisily from these banks with their great pedestals of earth attached, to emerge for a moment a hundred yards downstream and be sucked down again by whirlpools: by that river which was swallowing up the edges of the old park, with its eighteenth-century wrought-iron railings and seats and its two stone dogs.

‘Now who will that be?’ said Signor Gron, taking off his gold-rimmed spectacles. ‘Callers even at this time of night? I dare say it’s about the subscription, that man from the parish council has been a perfect nuisance these last few days. Flood victims! Where are they all, anyway? They keep asking for money but I haven’t seen one victim, not a single one. As though … Who’s there? Who is it?’ he enquired in a low voice as the butler appeared from behind the curtain.