“She’s from America,” he said importantly. “She’s touring round in that car – seeing the country. Her name’s Mrs Bannister. She’s just down from Dublin.” He kept his major item till the last. “She says she was born here in Cloncraig.”

“What was her name, then?” asked several voices.

“Maclean,” said Joe Lane. “But there’s none of that name here now. Must have been before my time.”

Most people in the bar turned to old Neil Fairlie for confirmation.

He nodded. “There was a family of that name, that went away to America, near forty years ago. They lived down by the bridge. Neil Maclean – I mind him because he had the same name as me. There was two or three children, too. Aye, it might be the same.”

“She’s grown up a bit since then,” said Paddy Finane, pursuing obliquely the thoughts which never seemed to leave him. “And married as well. Someone’s a lucky man.”

“Mrs Bannister,” said Neil Fairlie musingly. “That’s a good Irish name, too. I wonder what old Neil Maclean came to, in America. He was a stonemason when he left. Must have made money, by the look of her.”

They discussed Mrs Bannister for a long time – her looks, her gait, her clothes, the purpose of her visit. Presently the serving girl, who had taken up the hot water bottle, put her head round the corner of the bar to report that the visitor wore a lace nightgown “you could see half a mile through”, and had a special travelling case with nothing but paint and powder and scent in it.

“What did I tell you?” said Paddy Finane triumphantly. “She’s a real madam, that one.”

It was years since Cloncraig had seen such a person; and not within living memory had the Cloncraig Arms housed a woman staying by herself, let alone one like this. The knowledge that just above their heads slept a woman of this special, exotic quality – married, but travelling alone without her husband – in silk and lace, with boxes of paint and powder close to hand – the knowledge that such a woman shared the Cloncraig Arms with them took hold of the men in the bar, pricking them strangely. She might have been there beside them: they could not keep away from her, they could not escape her effect. They could almost smell that perfume, touch that nightgown, see those soft reclining limbs … It gave them all a continuing itch of masculinity. The talk that night was very bawdy.

On the floor above them, in the comfortable, creaking warmth of Joe Lane’s best bedroom, the object of all their thoughts, Mrs Bannister, was reading herself to sleep.

In bed, in the lace nightgown which had so scandalized the servant girl, Belle Bannister was to some extent softened and feminized; but she still looked, and was, a self-sufficient woman with the combined elegance and toughness of metropolitan America. Good-looking she certainly was, with dark colouring and a fine, fresh skin, but the ‘French whore’ stricture of Paddy Finane could not have been wider of the mark. In Cloncraig, she shone with suspect brilliance: in her own milieu, she looked what she was – a handsome, tailored, slightly masculine woman well able to take care of herself, having lived her own life for twenty years and regretting very little of it.