‘NOW, MY DEAR,’ CANON THORBY SAID, ‘YOU GO and have your rest, and I will show Miss Mayfield the church. Then, as you know, I have to go to Wandford. I may be late.’

Miss Thorby rose and extended a limp, graceful hand.

‘I hope that you’re going to be very happy in Walwyk, Miss Mayfield, and that we shall see a great deal of one another.’

Like everything else that Isabel Thorby had said during the visit, it was friendly, well intentioned, but quite meaningless. Canon Thorby had, Miss Mayfield reflected, shown great perspicacity to have seen the effect his sister might have on people; her manner was gracious, her words well chosen, her smile sweet and frequent, but it all added up to nothing. She was not there, and she somehow reduced you to nothing, too. But – and this was what Miss Mayfield found so disconcerting – three or four times she had caught Miss Thorby in the act of staring at her in a manner both searching and speculative. Each time, the stare had changed immediately to a smile and some comment had been made, some question asked, as though the stare had been a mere waiting for attention. But that was not true. It was as though you stood facing a house whose windows were all closely curtained; nobody at home here! Then you looked away for a second and looked back and caught just a glimpse of a curtain twitched aside, of an avidly observant eye watching. And then nothing again.

Perhaps behind this lifeless façade there lived a real woman, with hopes, and fears. Perhaps Isabel Thorby looked thus at any female with whom her brother was brought into contact. Danger here? Well, in that case, she could be reassured; the new schoolmistress was forty-four, not well preserved, not well dressed, and, more important still, long, long ago resigned to spinsterhood. Quite harmless.

‘We go through the garden,’ Canon Thorby said. In the afternoon sunshine the wide, newly mown lawns lay like green plush, stroked this way and that. In two oblong beds immediately outside the drawing-room windows, pink tulips swam in a blue haze of forget-me-nots. Some stone steps led up to another lawn, and here, on each side of the path, was a wide herbaceous border, which in a week or two would blaze with colour. After that the path branched, and they took the way that led through a shrubbery and ended at a gate in a wall. Beyond lay the church, a small grey building, which at its western end incorporated a circular stone tower in such a way that one half of the tower was within the main building and the other half formed a rounded bulge in the wall.