Having glided from lecturing about bulls to boasting, having boasted a little longer, and with his literary cards still discreetly up his sleeve, he asked for his hat and took his leave.

She seemed so normally willing to let him go that he allowed himself to remark, ‘Perhaps we shall meet again,’ to which she replied, ‘Perhaps.’

The wind, and the brambles it lashed across his insteps as he made his way down her breakneck path, recalled Charlton to a sense of real life. Even so, the thought that he had been a suspected murderer made him glad to remember that his alibi, if it should get as far as that, depended on more than one frail Dean. Higher dignitaries than Deans had been among the picked, small audience 61who, together with the representative best of the British Broadcasting Corporation and outer thousands, heard him deliver the first of his lectures on Dante’s Il Convito at the hour when poor Mary sat eating her pilchards.

He got into the taxi. It was cold and tomblike, but, thanks to Miss Glasscastle’s attentions, his overcoat was delightfully warm. As the car gathered speed, he looked back for a last sight of Buttercups and saw Miss Glasscastle running with a swift, sure foot down the precipice. Continuing to watch her through the back window, he saw her enter the telephone booth. But the poor, savage, stupid creature could do him no real harm. At the worst, the hand of the law would only momentarily impede him. She had shot her bolt with those releasing words, ‘Mary must have thrown you away.’

Looking steadily at the driver’s innocent red ears, he repeated the words (though not so loud that the ears would catch them), for they were words he would have to get used to. Said in his own voice, they ceased to be an insult and became a statement. He was scarcely to be intimidated by a statement. He was always making them; they paved his reputation. Very well, then, let it be a statement: ‘Mary must have thrown you away,’ he said again, and a tree toppling toward him under the wind seemed to bow its head in assent, like a member of an audience. It was, moreover, an ancillary statement; it described a subsequent action; for he had been the first to throw, discarding Mary, abandoning with resolute relief a career of being negligible and ungainly and a poet only by the pang. 62Mary’s throwing was no more than a womanly ‘You’re another.’ And yet he felt himself discarded, shrugged off into purposelessness and purposelessly conveyed towards trees that reiterated a gesture of acquiescence. The young man who wrote the letters would have been glad enough of a little acquiescence, a little homage, but he didn’t get it; he would never have got it; he was not worth the keeping.

At this present moment, Miss Glasscastle was probably eating a revengeful high tea, and he was going home to Burton St Laurence with the very assurance he had set out to obtain. There were no letters, all his alarms were scotched, and after being briefly incommoded at a railway station he would resume his harmonious twin careers and forget the young man who allowed himself to be called Stiggins. His youth—why should he wish to recall it? And yet how could he not recall it, looking out from his hurrying box at this cold and cruel spring? And why, at this late hour, and without even one letter to revive him (surely she might have spared him one of those many, many letters), must he become aware of how irreparably he had impoverished himself when, in weakness and despair, he had thrown that young man away?