The Miss Goodbody’s, June 6th, 1920. A letter from Carriglas says that Linchy has been murdered. All day long I cannot come to terms with it. ‘Bless for us this food and drink,’ intoned the older Miss Goodbody this evening in the dining-room, and when her Grace ended the girls conversed in the permitted docile manner, none noticing my distress. Plates of bread were passed about, thickly cut and soaked in milk to keep it seeming fresh. Bread taken with meat must not be cut, but broken between the fingers. ‘Chilly it was on the walk today,’ Miss Fawson remarked, and then went on to repeat what various girls said on the walk, and how the east wind was like a wind in March, and how really one didn’t know whether to wear an extra cardigan or not, and how delicious the scrambled egg was. (An opinion, incidentally, shared by no one else, certainly not by the Misses Goodbody, who were served with two platefuls of steaming haddock.) I could not concentrate on Miss Fawson’s chatter, nor give my full attention to the headmistresses’ ritual interrogation as to classroom progress during the day. I remembered Mrs Rolleston explaining to me what Villana had meant when she’d said that Colonel Rolleston had stolen Linchy in Dublin: he’d been a waiter in Davison’s Hotel, where the Colonel often stayed. ‘The children were fond of Linchy, you know,’ Mrs Rolleston’s letter went on. ‘Your brother was too.’ I remembered how the butler had told them stories about the visitors who’d stayed at Davison’s Hotel, the eccentric Lord Mountbellew who liked to begin his dinner with coffee and end it with a plate of soup, and Father Ponsonby who walked in his sleep but always into chambermaids’ bedrooms, and Mr Staverling of Galway who was said to be a woman. An inebriated chefs assistant had once added Vim instead of salt to a pheasant casserole. The wooden leg of a Major Flaherty had fallen from an open window and been carted away by dustmen. ‘I would expect your brother to have written to you, but somehow I feel he may not have. Hugh was staying here when all this occurred; that night, all four of them had crossed over to a party near Kilmore. It was a terrible horror for them of course, but then a strange thing happened. Before he left Carriglas—it was a week after Linchy’s funeral—your brother’s engagement to Villana was declared to be broken off. That is the other piece of unhappy news I have to impart to you. Perhaps, on reflection, you will not find it strange.’

The Misses Goodbody’s, June 9th, 1920. Hugh has not written, but today I received a letter from the rectory, imparting the information that the engagement has indeed been broken off. No reason has been given. No reason is known, as far as I can see.