She took a notebook out of the carton, opened it at what he saw was a list of names, and ran her slow red finger down the column. ‘No Stiggins here,’ she said, smiling like a schoolmistress. ‘No Mackrell, either. Mary must have thrown you away.’

The shock of relief was so violent that it was as though a mine had been sprung under Charlton’s feet. It was, undoubtedly, relief. The strain had gone on for some time, and must have been worse than he realized. It is a commonplace that any sudden relief is unmanning. Of course it was relief, and when he had recovered from the shock of its impact, and from this disabling sensation that he was about to burst into tears, he would know how glad he was, and be thankful that he had nothing worse to trouble him than the slight shame of having got into a fuss about nothing.

His nerves steadied, he was himself again. And instead of feeling relief, he confronted a gaping humiliation. Mary had thrown him away. She had hoarded letters—more than enough, the woman had said, and the list of names down 57which the red finger had promenaded was a long list—but his were not among them. He had not been thought worth keeping.

‘Perhaps you’ll be luckier with that bull.’ Pleasure at inflicting humiliation made her voice exactly like Mary’s. It whipped him back into the former kennel, where he used to sit trembling, a resentful, would-be assertive, half-grown, and not in the least gay young dog. Mary then, and now Mildred.

It was a long time since he had been so rawly in contact with a woman; he was out of practice and had forgotten how intensely disagreeable a woman can be when she is not tamed into her duty of being agreeable. He half rose, for why should he extend the pretext of hoping to be serviceable to the biographer? He would take himself off on that other pretext, the Spixworth bull. Even if it had been a real bull—some wretched, ageing barnyard animal, out of condition and peering with dull, imprisoned eyes—he would still have found it more tolerable to stand in cold mud with the gale clawing at his overcoat than to sit any longer in a room where one woman had been murdered and another woman was being disagreeable. But she had got his hat in her oven, and somehow he could not abase himself into asking for it. He sat down again, barely able to contain his rage and beyond making any attempt to conceal it. A burst of smoke was driven down the chimney. As it cleared away, he saw her looking at him. Her regard was steady, cool and enlightened. There was a kind of hideous welcome in it, and he knew, as plainly as though she had said it aloud, that 58he had been revealed to her as Mary’s murderer, dragged back, as murderers are, to the place of the crime.