‘Oh,’ gasped Cornelius again, clasping and unclasping his hands more furiously than ever, and moving from one foot to the other in an ecstasy of embarrassment, excitement, horror and apprehension of revelation. ‘If only I could make you see how utterly absurd you all are!’

They looked at him; all the faces turned towards him with expressions varying from total aloofness to mild enquiry. Cornelius stared back, aghast at his own bad taste.

‘I cannot think that a helpful observation,’ said Sir Randolph eventually.

‘No,’ said Cornelius, wringing his hands and retreating step by step across the grass. ‘No, it is not helpful.’

Aline had been standing with Charles Farquhar. They had heard the scream but not at full pitch because they had been screened by the trees; however, it had been perfectly clear that it was a human cry.

‘Oh dear,’ Aline had said at once in her coolest voice. ‘Gilbert has over-reached himself.’

She meant it as a joke. She had not accompanied her husband on shooting parties for so many years without coming to know that on the rare occasions when there was an accident (and never in her experience had this gone beyond a harmless flesh wound and a scare), it was not Gilbert who was responsible. More than once when she had asked him why he had let some opportunity slip he had told her that he never shot unless he could see further than where his bullet might fall if he missed – ‘A good shot is a safe shot’ – so that when she spoke she did not mean it. Even so it struck Charles as rather a heartless remark – after all, some poor fool had probably thought his hour had come – and when, following slowly in the direction which Ida and Bob Lilburn had taken towards the scene of the accident, they had been met by Glass and had realized it was true, he was deeply shocked. He thought it not at all the sort of thing a woman should say about her husband, even to her lover, and even if it was true.

‘Is the fellow badly hurt?’ he asked.

‘It caught him in the face, sir. Doctor West has been sent for.’

‘Blinded,’ said Aline seriously, as Glass, touching his hat, hurried on his way. ‘Expensive.’

Charles Farquhar wondered how he had failed to be offended by her lack of taste before. This was the sort of thing, he thought, which showed people up.

‘Most unfortunate,’ he said. ‘I suppose we’d better be getting back to the house if we can’t do anything.’

Aline looked round to see what everyone else was doing.

‘Are they not going to shoot the duck then?’ she asked vaguely.

‘My dear Aline, when a man has been shot in the face … It’s not as if he’d just been peppered you know.’

As Aline looked at him, taking in the fact that she had some need to redeem herself, she was distracted by the appearance from the wood behind him of two unexpected figures.