Olivia had approached and stood between two of the beaters, looking down at Tom. Lionel stood behind her. Minnie was to be seen walking towards them across the field with Ida and Bob Lilburn. Beside and behind them the beaters in their pale smocks grouped and regrouped as they moved slowly away in obedience to Glass’s command. From one of the groups came a loud laugh, quickly hushed; someone on being told that Tom Harker had been shot had thought it funny, a question of a fright or a flesh wound, a pellet in a leg maybe, and had had to be shut up and told it had got him in the face.

Sir Randolph shifted his weight from one foot to the other irritably.

‘Where’s this doctor?’

Cornelius had approached in a tentative sideways sort of way and now looked down at Tom, and at the blood which having already soaked through the handkerchief was now covering with fresh scarlet the hand which held it there. Cornelius felt the immediate onset of violent indigestion. He looked across at Sir Randolph standing guard in his wide-brimmed hat, white shirt, tweed waist coat and watch-chain – his coat was still under Tom’s head – and at Gilbert Hartlip expressionless beside him, and next to them the two beaters who still stood and stared at Tom, and between them Olivia, in piteous contemplation of this or some other tragedy, behind her Lionel, beyond her the long-skirted, hatted and furred figures of Minnie and Ida escorted by Lord Lilburn; and the slowness with which those who moved did so and the stillness with which the others stood, and the gathering dusk which brought tones of violet to the shadows, and the intermittent golden leaves which slowly fell through the still air, all reinforced the ceremonial aspect he had noticed before.

‘Oh!’ he started, as if there were something he must tell them; but stopped, twisting his fingers. (‘Don’t writhe,’ Ada had said to him more than once. ‘Your platform manner would be far better if you didn’t writhe so much.’) No one looked at him.

Gilbert was saying to Sir Randolph, in the same quiet voice as before, ‘I’m most awfully sorry, naturally.’

Sir Randolph moved irritably again. He did not want to speak to Gilbert. Particularly he did not want to speak to him in front of other people. At the same time he was very angry; not only did all transgressions against the rules of safety in shooting make him angry, but one glance at the wound had told him that the shot which made it had been fired from far too close to have been anything but the shot of a fool or a madman. Since he knew that Gilbert was not the first he must believe him to have been however temporarily the second.

‘I’ll make it all right with him,’ Gilbert was saying. ‘Financially, I mean.’

Sir Randolph gave a short exasperated groan; then said in a low voice, ‘You were not shooting like a gentleman, Gilbert.’