She heard again from Miss Brodie at the time of Mary Macgregor’s death, when the girl ran hither and thither in the hotel fire and was trapped by it. “If this is a judgment on poor Mary for betraying me, I am sure I would not have wished…”

“I’m afraid,” Jenny wrote, “Miss Brodie is past her prime. She keeps wanting to know who betrayed her. It isn’t at all like the old Miss Brodie, she was always so full of fight.”

Her name and memory, after her death, flitted from mouth to mouth like swallows in summer, and in winter they were gone. It was always in summer time that the Brodie set came to visit Sandy, for the nunnery was deep in the country.

When Jenny came to see Sandy, who now bore the name Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, she told Sandy about her sudden falling in love with a man in Rome and there being nothing to be done about it. “Miss Brodie would have liked to know about it,” she said, “sinner as she was.”

“Oh, she was quite an innocent in her way,” said Sandy, clutching the bars of the grille.

Eunice, when she came, told Sandy, “We were at the Edinburgh Festival last year. I found Miss Brodie’s grave, I put some flowers on it. I’ve told my husband all the stories about her, sitting under the elm and all that; he thinks she was marvellous fun.”

“So she was, really, when you think of it.”

“Yes, she was,” said Eunice, “when she was in her prime.”

Monica came again. “Before she died,” she said, “Miss Brodie thought it was you who betrayed her.”

“It’s only possible to betray where loyalty is due,” said Sandy.

“Well, wasn’t it due to Miss Brodie?”

“Only up to a point,” said Sandy.

And there was that day when the enquiring young man came to see Sandy because of her strange book of psychology, “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” which had brought so many visitors that Sandy clutched the bars of her grille more desperately than ever.

“What were the main influences of your school days, Sister Helena? Were they literary or political or personal? Was it Calvinism?”

Sandy said: “There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.”

The End