‘Fraser is at Waterloo this evening,’ Mrs Pyke said, leaning forward a little as if this were classified information, though it had been reported in the newspaper that morning. ‘He was with the Premier at Newcastle on Saturday night, of course, where they had upwards of six thousand, I understand.’

‘He is not concerned?’ Eleanor enquired. ‘Waterloo is very near to Darlington, where they set fire to an effigy of the Premier and the police were obliged to put it out.’

‘Was the Premier burned?’ asked Marguerite, glancing up fascinated.

‘No, dear,’ said her mother. ‘The Premier was not burned, thank the Good Lord, an effigy of the Premier was burned. It is quite a separate thing.’

Marguerite looked disappointed. ‘Then what is it for?’

‘To frighten people,’ said Eleanor. ‘Though I am sure no one was frightened. It was a very stupid thing to do. We had our own fright on our journey to Penrith. A log was thrown across the tracks and but for the quick thinking of the train driver we should have been quite derailed or worse.’

‘Goodness!’ said Mrs Pyke.

Marguerite adopted a considered expression, as though she were weighing up the probability of such an incident genuinely resulting in major calamity. ‘Goodness,’ she murmured at last, echoing her mother. She took up her mother’s hand and began absent-mindedly to twist the rings on her mother’s fingers.

‘Were you frightened?’ asked Mrs Pyke.

‘I was a little. Not at first, but afterwards.’

Mrs Pyke nodded. ‘That is how it is sometimes,’ she said, as though she had experienced many such incidents in her time.

Alice came in. She deposited tea and a plate of Mrs Flynn’s scones, and Marguerite observed her for she was of that age where all things were curious to her and none more so than herself so, when she observed the Dunlevy’s servant, it was to see how the maid might view herself. But Alice left and so her impressions of Marguerite, if indeed she had any, remained undetermined.

‘Oh! Mrs Flynn’s scones! There is nothing like them,’ declared Mrs Pyke. ‘But, Marguerite, you must watch your figure—you are quite tall enough.’

‘I like being tall,’ said Marguerite, selecting the largest and most perfectly buttery and floury scone on the plate.

‘Yes, dear, but your husband might not,’ said her mother, patting her knee.

‘Then I shall marry a tall husband. Or I shall find a short husband who does not mind his wife being taller than he.’

‘I doubt there is such a husband,’ said Eleanor, observing curiously, as she always did, the communication between mother and daughter. It was more curious to her now that her friends’ daughters had reached this age where they accompanied their mothers on calls and where they came to picnics in pretty white dresses and sat under trees and no longer ran about underfoot as they had only a year or so earlier.