Hazel was conscious of his rebellion and sometimes cocked a drowsy eye at him as he crept out of the room, but she guessed that he wanted to be left alone. Sara was conscious of it — she was a night prowler herself — but for a time he avoided her probing.

In this unearthly second life he didn’t always brood. Sometimes he read, soaked himself in the oddest magazine articles and in books stolen from Sara’s shelves: articles about Javanese coffee culture, dialects in Burma, the roof of Ely Cathedral, Cycling in Tanganyika with Notes on Hotels in Dar es Salaam. He laid the magazine down to dream out one-dimensioned pictures woven of coloured cloud: Pike’s Peak in the sun, bell towers of Bruges, himself playing the piano in an English cottage, himself chatty at the counter of the general store in Stonefield, with Hazel gaily clattering pans in the kitchen.

Most embarrassing of all were the nights when he did not lie awake, when the worries treacherously let him go to sleep, then woke him jeeringly at three o’clock or four or five.

It was cold downstairs then, even when it wasn’t cold.

This November morning, at four-thirty, he knew that he was caught and would not sleep again until an hour at which a responsible man would be brightly awakening.

He bundled himself up grotesquely: sweater as well as dressing-gown, with an old golf stocking about his neck. The house was so still that it was noisy with creeping burglars. He looked out of a window and shivered. The street was bitterly empty; the pavements, and a fire plug that should have been a lively red but was now grey, seemed lonely.

He sat in the kitchen, at the metal-topped table, an illicit cup of coffee and a folder showing the Australian airlines before him. He startled at distant shuffling feet, the creak of the swing door between dining-room and butler’s pantry. He beamed with comfort as Sara’s face, sharpened with weariness, came peering at him.

She smiled, and she sounded genial:

‘Why, you disreputable old tramp! Couldn’t you sleep? Neither could I.’

Sara tucked the ridiculous golf stocking in about his neck, she clucked at him and kissed his ear. She seemed more truly his little girl than since she had been a lanky child. She sat opposite him, chin in hand, and said softly, ‘This insomnia is the worst idea I ever met. I’ve got some little pills for it. Don’t you want some?’

‘No indeed.’

‘But you’ve got to sleep!’

‘Why? What’s the difference, as long as you get rest? The need for sleep is kind of a superstition. I enjoy breaking up my old routine. And besides, I don’t want to get this little pill habit.’

‘Mine aren’t habit-forming, not a bit.’

‘But the habit of taking them, of depending on taking anything at all to make you sleep, is habit-forming. Don’t get to depend on it, sweetie.’

The whole hour, the empty hour that was neither night nor day, seemed to him strange as Sara’s abnormal kindness. He was too listless for self-defence, and thus was he betrayed into honesty.