Alice was quiet. The words froze in the space between them.

‘You will leave this house. Now. This minute. Before my husband returns. I will not have you in this house one more minute.’

‘Madam!’

The clock on the landing below struck the quarter hour and Eleanor flung the door open wide and stood with her back to the room and to the horror of that scene.

‘You shall leave this house before the clock strikes the hour or I shall telephone the police.’

Eleanor went back downstairs and her hands shook on the bannister and she stumbled once but righted herself. She went all the way down to the drawing room.

It was later than she had thought; the clock had chimed a quarter before nine o’clock. So be it. The girl and the child would be gone by nine. She sat and waited.

And it is a long time to wait, a quarter of an hour, when broken down into each component minute and second and beat of the heart. Eleanor sat and she waited. She thought of very little and she thought of everything. She understood, at last, what sort of a man was her husband, that he would kneel at the bed of one woman to profess his love and at the same time impregnate a servant girl—as Leon Jellicoe had done, or worse! Were all men such, then? Their baseness and treachery indistinguishable from one another? That he would accuse her of an affair so that he might hide his own transgressions. And she understood, too, the deceit of the servant who colluded with the master of the house to hide her sinful state. She saw that it was in the nature of such people to beget a child through deception and duplicity, to hide a pregnancy, to bear a bastard child in shameful secrecy in an attic room.

It was astonishing how clearly she now saw the world.

So Eleanor sat and she waited.

She heard every sound. A carriage rattled up to the house and she feared it was her husband returned. But it could not be, as he was with the Premier at Bathurst. And sure enough the carriage soon passed and was gone. A wind rustled the leaves of the giant fig and caused the branches of the frangipani to tap against a windowpane. The house creaked and groaned and resettled on its foundations like a very old man in a chair who has seen all that life has and wishes to see no more.

But even the slowest quarter hour must submit eventually, and she heard footsteps on the stairs. Her hands closed slowly around the arm of her chair. She stared straight ahead.

She heard a sob outside the door.

‘Please, Madam, I beg you not to do this. I have no place to go, and there is the baby, it is so small and I have nothing to give it.’

Eleanor sat and waited.

‘Madam.’