What a way to leave Mr Tharkell, who’d kind of made a job for her. Ah, but even if she owed him a month’s notice, she had the right of it there, for he said himself that she had a month’s wages due on the Monday. Right bothered, he was. He’d always had a soft spot for her, ever since she’d nursed him through the jaundice. Rung up the police, he had. Go on, not the police. Yes, the police; said she was missing. Know what the police said? Unless she’d committed some crime, it was no affair of theirs; she was a grown woman, free to come and go as she wished. Did Mr Tharkell have any reason to think anything had happened to her, like murder or such? Then there was nothing they could do.

But there was the house, full of furniture and all the little gadgets poor Wesley had made. And clothes! Mr Tharkell said that when he drove her to the station, she’d had just a small suitcase and Sydney had a holdall, just what people would take going for the weekend. Sydney wore his best suit and carried his mackintosh; Mrs Baines had the black coat and skirt she’d had for Wesley’s funeral and an overcoat.

What about the rent? Due, like everybody else’s, on September the thirtieth. After that, would the Canon take possession and let Dick Hayer and Clara Woodley have it? Time they got married. . . .

The cottage acquired, almost immediately, the sad look of a deserted house. Somebody lobbed a stone through the window of Wesley’s workroom, and no doubt others would have followed but that Canon Thorby opened his Scripture lesson next day with a homily upon respect for other people’s property and pointed out that if another stone went through the Baines’s or any other window, there would be no trip to London for the Cup Final this season. No other stone was thrown.

Mrs Baines had been gone for a week when Ethel Rigby, lingering after everyone else had gone home, said:

‘Miss, can I speak to you?’

‘What is it, Ethel?’

It had not escaped Miss Mayfield’s watchful eye that Ethel had cheered up since Sydney’s departure, and even now, though what she said was not particularly heartening, she spoke with something almost jaunty in her voice and manner.

‘I thought I’d better tell you quick. My gran says I’m not to be Mary Queen of Scots.’

Due to Miss Mayfield’s illness and absence, the scenes from history had not been enacted at the summer fête, and were to be part of the Christmas entertainment.