With some presence of mind, Miss Mayfield closed the gate. Sydney gave a yelp, dropped the basket and the cow parsley and set off in pursuit. For the next ten minutes they stalked the rabbit, swerving, dodging, heading it off, not speaking, and moving as quietly as possible so as not to alarm it. At the end of that time they had worked down along the side of the cottage, and then to its rear. There, in an angle formed by the out-jutting scullery against the back wall of the sitting room, Sydney recaptured his rabbit, and Miss Mayfield, completely winded, leaned against the wall to recover her breath. From where she stood she had an uninterrupted view of the room within. Mrs Baines had spread out all the papers concerning the scholarship on the table and was sitting with her elbows on them, her head propped on her hands and her face wearing an expression of such utter misery and despair as Miss Mayfield had seldom seen.

Mastering her breath at last, she said, ‘Sydney, you should feed the rabbit now; that would help it to settle down. I’m just going to have another word with your mother.’

She entered by the back door, stepped across the scrupulously tidy scullery and through into the sitting room.

‘Mrs Baines,’ she said, ‘I can see that something about all this is causing you great distress. Couldn’t you tell me and let us see . . .’

Mrs Baines jumped up, sending her chair screeching backwards. Her face flushed, her voice coarsened with fury.

‘Get out! Don’t ever come in my house again till I ask you. It’s all your fault. Poking and prying. Nosey old maid. Bothering about Ethel Rigby. What’s she worth compared with my boy? A tart’s brat, doomed before she was born. And on her account look where you’ve landed me, that was always a decent woman. I’m the one that has to pay for your blundering, I’d like to . . .’

She stopped suddenly, and the angry colour seemed to fall away from her face; she stared beyond Miss Mayfield towards the scullery door. Miss Mayfield turned, expecting to see either Sydney or Wesley, her mind already fumbling for some feasible, smooth words that might explain this angry tirade. There was nobody there, nothing there, until she dropped her gaze to below the level where a human being would stand; and there, just in the doorway, was the cat which was called Vesper in one place and in another, Smut.

Later on, looking back, she was to say to herself that at such-and-such a point she knew what she suspected, and that point, like the horizon to a traveller, seemed to move onwards with her own advance through time. Actually, she knew at that moment, but presently dismissed what she knew as too preposterous for belief.