‘Send someone to get more water from the river,’ he said to Glass. ‘And someone to run after Lady Nettleby and ask her to send Patten down with some ice from the house directly. Where can Doctor West have got to?’

‘Maybe he was out,’ said Glass. ‘Mrs Page is expecting again any day. But his housekeeper would know. Dan will find him.’

‘Too late, too late,’ intoned Tom. Then he gave a tremendous groan.

Cicely hovered on the edge of the group, frightened by Tom’s voice but determined to deliver her message to Glass. She was also shocked by an apprehension which in fact was a misunderstanding: as she had approached the group round Tom she had intercepted a look between Olivia and Lionel which had expressed such unutterable and infinite sadness that she had immediately assumed that it must have been Lionel who had fired the shot which had hit Tom. She had not spoken to either of them, but as they turned and began to walk very slowly side by side across the field towards the road which led back to the house she looked after them with sympathy; she thought she had never felt anything so deeply as whatever it was they were feeling.

‘I could have prevented it,’ said Lionel eventually.

They had reached the road and were walking towards the lodge gates. It was the first time either had spoken since they had left the little group gathered round Tom Harker by the side of the wood.

‘No,’ said Olivia.

‘If I had refused to join in that absurd rivalry which had somehow started up between us, if I had simply missed a few birds on purpose … I have never shot so competitively as I did today. I don’t usually shoot like that. I’m not so keen. I don’t bother. I shoot to enjoy myself.’

‘That was all you were doing today.’

‘No, I was trying to get a better score than Gilbert. God knows why.’

‘He provoked you.’

‘That’s no excuse. I was not as insane as he was but I was a little insane.’

‘It was to do with what we were talking about.’

‘No.’

‘Yes. We were talking about something that was impossible as if it were possible and it was because you were mad in that way that you were mad in the other. We were not thinking clearly. We were not feeling clearly.’

‘I can’t accept that. Perhaps because I was preoccupied in thinking about us I didn’t give enough thought to what I was allowing to happen with Gilbert. That’s the most I will allow.’

‘We were allowing ourselves to think extravagances. We were not testing them against reality.’

‘It was not an extravagance. It was true.’

‘It was a dream.’

‘I will always dream it.’

‘But we have to live in the real world, a world with other people in it, not a dream world, with only us.’

He felt an extraordinary heaviness of heart. It was not that he was going to give up, so much as that he foresaw he might not succeed.