Looking from one to another of their grave, lined faces, he suddenly abandoned all hope for himself. Too many times he had made one in a stricken circle like this. Too many drinks had been ordered by himself in similar circumstances for him to ignore the signs. Stirrup cups, you called them in Lahore. He was dead, all right. Denby didn’t make mistakes. Denby had the facts. He began to feel a little embarrassed, like an inadvertent eavesdropper. It was indecent to attend his own wake. He supposed he ought to go. Where?

“I say, Totleigh—” Denby raised his head from the glass. “Bit of a blow for your girl, too—Alice, I mean— I mean, weren’t they—”

“Presumably they were,” said Totleigh moodily, his tall thin figure drooping against the mantelpiece. “One never knows these days what one’s young people are really about, does one? She’s been seeing quite a lot of his brother lately. It will be hard on her, of course, in any case, but—I don’t know—”

Hilary was staring at him. George and Alice? For a moment there was no reaction, and he wondered if he had conveniently left his emotions somewhere along the way. Of course Alice had always hated his job—even tried to make him promise to give it up and stay in England. It was because he had half expected this to be his last undertaking before handing in his resignation that he had been so prompt and willing on the day that the Home Office had rung through to Nuns Farthing. So George was cutting in, was he. One must look into this.

“I’m thinking Alice won’t miss him as much as we do, at that,” said Totleigh, and glanced round at them piteously from the hearthrug. “I always thought of him almost as a son. I’ve never felt that way about George, somehow— Three double brandies,” he added, as a club servant appeared in answer to the bell.

But this is awful, thought Hilary. They’ll have me crying over them in a minute. It’s not as bad as all that, chaps, really it isn’t, he wanted to say....

“If it’s any satisfaction to us,” Denby was saying to the rest of them, “he had finished the job before they got him. The mullah is caught red-handed. If that’s any comfort,” he muttered, contemplating the amber liquid in his glass. “And I suppose it ought to be.”

“It ought to be to Hilary,” said Calthorpe grimly.

And it was, but Hilary had had enough of this. He couldn’t go on standing there and watch them break their hearts over him. He must take himself off till they came round a bit. The brandies would fix them up.... He turned away aimlessly, and sidestepped the man returning with a tray on which sat three tall glasses and a siphon.