On the Saturday evening there was no call from Wandford, and the Postmistress, with a few of her cronies, was watching the clock and beginning to predict the worst when a hired car entered Walwyk and stopped by the Baines’s gate. Mrs Baines alighted alone and sent the car away. She looked so terrible, everyone said, that they were sure Sydney was dead. They were also sure that the only decent thing to do was to wait a few minutes while she broke the news to Wesley and then go to commiserate – and learn the details.

They found her, dry-eyed but pale and wild-looking, ‘getting out her cooking things as though she’d gone crazy’, Ella Flack reported. No, she said, Sydney was just the same; but she had to give a thought to Wesley, too, hadn’t she? How was he going to live through the next week with no food in the house?

‘We asked him to eat along of us,’ Ella Flack said. ‘Everybody asked him. He said even Miss Mayfield asked him to supper. You shouldn’t have bothered.’

Mrs Baines said, well, she had bothered, and now she must get on with it.

When the meal was cooked and eaten, Mrs Baines said that she was going for a walk. She needed some air after being cooped up for so long. Wesley offered to go with her, but she said she’d go alone, and having some work on hand, he settled down to it and never even glanced at the clock again until Canon Thorby arrived, hilariously excited, crying, ‘He’s better, Baines, better! They rang through just now and said he was conscious and complaining of hunger. Where’s your wife? . . . I long to see her face when she hears.’

‘Thank God! Thank God!’ Wesley said, before replying as to Emily’s whereabouts.

‘Indeed, yes, thank God,’ said Canon Thorby, trying not to sound perfunctory. ‘But they told me your wife had come home. Where is she?’

‘Gone out for a breath of air.’

They waited together until she returned. Canon Thorby was disappointed by her reception of his news. Showing no surprise, she asked, ‘Did they say when he could come home?’

‘Not precisely. But Baxter shall drive you in first thing tomorrow morning, and then you can make arrangements.’

All this account of words spoken and things done reached Miss Mayfield by the village grapevine, which had been given most of it by Sydney himself. In Sydney’s presence, Wesley Baines had attempted a clumsy teasing of Emily’s way of receiving the news. And she had asked, well, how had he received it, and he had told her what he had said and what Canon Thorby had said.