She felt sick with the kind of sickness which descent in a badly managed lift can induce. And she knew that what she suspected must be concealed.

‘My cat,’ she said, in a bright false voice. ‘He follows me everywhere.’

In an equally false, though not bright, voice, Mrs Baines said:

‘I’m sorry I spoke as I did. To tell the truth, you’ve upset me. I want the best for Sydney – and you may be right, this may be best. But he’s only just back out of hospital; I can’t part with him again, it’s not to be expected. But, on the other hand, what you said made me feel guilty. That’s what I meant about always having been a decent woman; you’ve made me feel selfish. That’s why I snapped out at you.’

Oh no, Miss Mayfield thought; plausible, but no! And the outburst against Ethel, completely unexplained.

She said, ‘You must forgive me – and my cat.’

Halfway along the garden path she met Wesley Baines, who carried his carpenter’s bag. He greeted her with a genuine smile.

‘Sydney and I have been having a rabbit hunt,’ she said and described it.

‘So he got it, did he? I made him a hutch. Week or two back, Em wouldn’t hear of his keeping a rabbit, but she’s come round.’

‘One is manageable; it is the families which make the problem,’ Miss Mayfield said.

‘You’re right there. And one we’re sticking to, if I have any say.’

Letting herself into her house, she felt, on this evening, for the first time, what Canon Thorby had called isolation. She longed for someone to whom she could have talked, exposed even the most fantastic ideas without being thought a fool. Rose would have been the perfect person; her self-denying, almost saintly life had not blinkered a lively and inquiring mind. She would have listened, gone with Miss Mayfield to the imaginative limit and then produced her own logical explanation of it all.

There must be a logical explanation.

Janet Lovelace, on the other hand, would have listened to the whole story purely for its entertainment value, added several fantastic suppositions of her own in order to enhance it and then destroyed the whole structure with a burst of hearty laughter, saying, ‘What nonsense!’

It must be nonsense.

But there was no one to talk to, and her thoughts went round and round in her head, getting nowhere, like circus horses. At last she took a piece of paper and wrote on it in small letters, so light as to be almost invisible, two lists, side by side. Oh the left-hand side she put down what she knew or believed; on the right, her suspicions.