“It’s all right. I’m glad you didn’t wait.”

“I suppose you’ve got the usual excuse of having had an exceptionally busy morning.”

“Well yes, I have been rather busy.”

“I’m sorry you preferred to stay in the surgery rather than join your guests last night.”

He said nothing.

“Did you invite that girl into the surgery?”

He said nothing.

“What business had she in there?”

He said nothing.

“A good job she’s leaving in a few days, anyhow.”

He said nothing.

“Are you too tired to answer me?”

Suddenly his nerves chafed to a raw edge he could barely endure. He said: “Yes, I’m rather tired. I’m sorry for the boy’s sake, that’s all.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I just don’t see any point in sending her away or in sending him away.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“I’m talking about Leni.”

“Oh, you are? I understand that, of course. It’s quite obvious why you want her to stay here.”

“What on earth are you driving at?”

Then, with even his indignation tired, he shrugged his shoulders and walked out of the room. It was true; they did not know what either of them meant; they had no points of contact, not even enough for an intelligible quarrel.

He drank his coffee in the surgery, and afterwards, as he went out for a few afternoon visits, the cloud of doubt and desperation suddenly lifted when he passed Leni in the hall. In her smile he saw something that made him exclaim, eagerly: “Leni, the boy I told you about last night — that case I said was hopeless — do you remember?”

“Yes?”

“Well, it isn’t — quite.”

“Nothing’s hopeless, is it?”

He thought seriously for a moment: was it really true that nothing was hopeless? Then he offered the result of his self-questioning. “A few things, probably, but we don’t know what they are, thank heaven.”

David had earned the reputation of being absent-minded — something in his glance, perhaps, in the casual way he would begin and end a chance conversation in the street, in the way he walked and dressed, with the knot of his tie always working looser and looser as the day advanced; most of all, perhaps, in the Legend of the Umbrella. This legend dated from 1902, from the service held in the Cathedral to celebrate the end of the South African War. David and Jessica had walked up Shawgate, David smoking a pipe and Jessica carrying an umbrella; and just outside the Cathedral porch, recollecting that he was about to enter a sacred building, David had pressed down the glowing tobacco and slipped the pipe, as he thought, into his pocket. But no; in the midst of the service the umbrella, left in the stand outside the pew, had begun to emit clouds of smoke and, before anyone could attend to it, burst into flame. No harm was done, nothing but a mild diversion caused, but the discovery of the doctor’s pipe in the wreckage had amused Calderbury more than it had amused Jessica.