How often, that summer, had I convinced myself it was nothing worse than taking out a boat without permission, or climbing the dead tree in the hillfield? How often had I said to myself, as I had to Mrs Rolleston just now, that children don’t realise? ‘Your father will be ashamed of you,’ I’d crossly reminded them, ‘and I am too.’ Their grandmother had meted out the sternest punishment she could devise; I’d made Hugh promise separately that nothing like this would ever happen again. In the end, after their initial disobedience, they’d been contrite, all four of them. Their high spirits had been abandoned for a quieter charm; the household returned to normal. When, later, the episode was retailed to Colonel Rolleston, as it had to be, there were silent mealtimes, and gifts, brought back to Carriglas, were not given. Then the pall of disapproval lifted. In retrospect, at the Misses Goodbody’s and in Dunadry Rectory, I convinced myself again that children are wild and often primitive. I did not believe there was some extra wickedness in the children of Carriglas, some harshness beneath the attractions of the surface. I did not think of the misdemeanour as ‘hunting a child’ and I don’t believe, at that time, Mrs Rolleston did either. The shadow of that summer faded beneath my own insistence that it should; and no doubt it did so for her too.

‘Am I right in what I say, Sarah, about another place and another time?’

I did not answer because I did not, any more, know how to. The rambling whisper began again, ceased, and was again renewed. A silence became prolonged.

‘Please look after them, Sarah. Please don’t desert us.’

I moved to the bedside, and reassured her. The myrtles and the little hebes must be protected when the first hard frosts of January came. It was always she who had remembered that. Her voice, speaking still of the garden, dwindled and then gathered strength again. She would remain in her bedroom now. She would not ever again go outside, she sensed that in her bones. She would not again descend the stairs, to the kitchen or the dining-room. But what she waited for would not come quickly: she sensed that too.