Following the coffin into the kirk, into the mitigated light that came through windows glazed with alternate diamonds of heliotrope and sickly green, Archie kept the imprint of the round sun on his retina. He blinked it away, it reasserted itself with a milder glow, and now it was no longer the round sun he saw, but the image of Martin’s face. It was a round and platter face, like the sun’s, and like Veronica’s. Like Veronica’s, and unlike the sun’s, it was totally English; except that the boy walked with a light thievish gait like every other Stevenson, Hew had not left much mark in him. The image of Martin’s face continued to haunt Archie, perhaps because all that Archie could inspect was the back of his head and the rims of his ears (Archie and Veronica had been shepherded into the second pew as deftly as they had been put in the 213second rank of the procession). Exalté, thought Archie. No wonder, a boy of seventeen, and robed in his first funeral, and Veronica’s son at that. But just as purple had boiled up over the green sun imaged on Archie’s retina, the image of Martin’s face now reappeared before his mind’s eye wearing a look of intense complacence. If that were so, if the boy were in fact taking Hew’s death as a subject for complacence, the bequest of Beatrix Stevenson by Raeburn should go out of the will as soon as a lawyer’s pen could scratch at it. Summoning himself to keep calm and to recall what Martin had really looked like, coming out from under the sycamore shade, Archie recalled that he had looked pale, just as you’d expect after all he’d been through—and breathless, which was natural enough after climbing the ridge of Clovie with all that English puppy-fat on his bones. But he had not looked so much breathless as if he were holding his breath, holding his breath as one does when putting the last storey on a house of cards—yes, and with the complacence of one who is successfully accomplishing that delicate act.

Archie, his wits sharpened by being in the place of his boyhood again, remarked to himself, ‘Something’s up.’

His eye rambled on to the Baxters. There they sat in their blacks, everything that four Scotsmen at a funeral should be, grave, sternly composed, panting a little from the weight of the coffin. Their hands lay spread on their knees, and they smelled of mothballs. Nothing wrong there. And yet there was something not quite right. A conviction expanded in Archie that the four Baxters were looking as if they felt 214about death pretty much as Veronica did. She triumphed over it outwardly, they inwardly pooh-poohed.

Everyone else looked perfectly ordinary.