She realized that she had not come here to give an account of Rose Tilbury.

‘Go on,’ Canon Thorby said. ‘This is extremely interesting.’

‘Rose Tilbury’s father was the Squire in the village where my father was the doctor. I was an only child, and she the one girl in a family of boys, so we spent a good deal of time together. When I went to college, Rose had a season in London and made quite a sensation, she was so beautiful. But she didn’t get married, and afterwards she went out to visit one of her brothers who had settled in Kenya. She said that as soon as she got there she knew what her life work was meant to be – work for and with the natives. She had some money of her own, and several well-to-do relatives from whom she would beg quite shamelessly. She came home – just after I’d graduated – to tell her people and to collect stores and funds, and she talked to me about . . . about what she planned. And by that time my father was dead, so I said I’d like to go back with her. And I did.’ In her enthusiasm she forgot to be cautious. ‘It was all very amateur, I suppose. The school seemed to grow up of its own accord, and then another friend of Rose’s, who’d had some medical experience, came and joined us, and we had a kind of hospital, too. We were all young, full of ideals and plans, and then – it seemed quite sudden, too – old and tough with experience, but still convinced that we weren’t wasting time. Three of the children who came to us knowing nothing, literally nothing, passed on to Fort Hare and did well. There were others who were promising. . . . It did almost break my heart to be obliged to leave.’

She stopped abruptly, feeling the tightening of her throat, the threat of a quiver in her voice.

‘On account of your health, I think you said.’

‘Yes. I had recurrent bouts of fever. In the end I was far more nuisance than help. I . . . I was told that the only cure was to come home.’

She was ashamed of her failure to be completely honest and mention that the fever, in the end, had led to a breakdown. But she had learned that people – particularly prospective employers – were very odd in their reaction to that word; they seemed to think that once having suffered a nervous breakdown you might at any minute run berserk with a hatchet.

‘And has Miss Tilbury, all this time, supported her venture entirely from her private funds?’

She imagined that he had slipped in the practical, mundane question as a counter to her emotionalism and shot him a grateful glance.