She realized that brought face to face with a fellow human creature in misery, one’s natural impulse was to say the comforting thing, to use words as an emollient.

‘I’m now going to ask you a question. How old is your wife?’

‘Em? She’s forty-four.’

So old, Miss Mayfield said to herself. Just my age, and she looks ten years younger at least.

Perhaps the thought showed on her face, for the man said with a kind of pitiable pride:

‘She don’t look it, do she? Even lately, when she’s sleeping so bad. But thass right; I was thirty-one and Em was thirty when we was married, and she didn’t look a day over twenty.’

‘Well, she is at or nearing the age when women often suffer little physical or mental upsets. Quite honest women go shoplifting, and . . .’ Good heavens, she had almost said that chaste, faithful wives became flirtatious! ‘. . . and sensible ones get all kinds of fads and fancies. At the last school I was in there was a perfectly ordinary woman who took against tea – of which she’d always been fond – to such an extent that she couldn’t bear the sight of a teapot. She went to a psychiatrist and he just told her to wait, and within a year she was drinking tea with the rest of us in the staff room. That is true. I saw it happen.’

He thought this over.

‘Em’s took against me, and against you, and against chapel, and took up with owd Mrs Rigby. And all on account of being forty-four?’ Suddenly his hands were still.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘God do work in a mysterious way. There I was, getting all bothered and thinking all manner of nasty things. And He put in my head to come and see you. I was on my knees, asking for guidance, and the idea of asking you sounded in my head as if somebody spoke the words. So I come, and I do believe you’ve give me my answer. I’ve been done by better than I deserved, thinking such evil thoughts and all.’

Her pity for him was enhanced by a faint sense of guilt.

‘I wouldn’t call it an evil thought, Mr Baines. Just a natural suspicion which any man might entertain. And strictly in confidence. I’ve already forgotten it.’