“Blackmail?”

He sighed.

“Darling, do let us avoid melodrama. So out of date. Why not settle the thing to our mutual advantage in a civilized manner?”

She said with a sudden quick heat,

“I can’t think why someone hasn’t murdered you, Alan!”

“My dear Pippa, you surprise me. Look out, there’s someone coming!” His voice had dropped.

The someone turned out to be two people with arms entwined-Miss Myrtle Page who worked in a beauty parlour and was quite a good advertisement for its wares, and a boy friend, one Norman Evans, clerk in a local solicitor’s office. When they had turned the next corner Myrtle said,

“Ooh! Did you hear that?”

To which Norman responded that he wasn’t deaf, thank you, and what about another kiss.

Away behind them Alan shook his head and said in a reproving voice,

“That’s what comes of letting your temper fly. They heard what you said all right.”

“So what?”

He laughed.

“So if you’ve got any idea about pushing me over the cliff you’d better think again, because they heard you say why hadn’t anyone murdered me, and they heard me call you Pippa. In the long run it will be cheaper to come to terms with me than to let yourself in for a hanging.”

She began to walk back in the direction of the house. There was more breeze going this way and she was glad of it.

They walked slowly and in silence. For his part, he had said as much as he meant to. Women only worked themselves into an obstinate state if you argued with them. He had said enough, and what he had said would say itself over and over again through the hours of a wakeful night.

Just before they came to the garden gate she spoke without turning her head.

“What do you want?”

Carmona reached her room with a feeling of unutterable relief. The evening was over, and whatever happened or didn’t happen, no one could make them live it through again. It had begun with an impression of approaching storm-dark clouds coming up from a long way off and brooding overhead. They had come, they had hovered, and they had passed. There had been no explosion.

She was astonished at the trend of her own thoughts. What cause could there be for this sense of dread and strain? If she lived, and if Alan lived, it was more or less certain that they would meet. This might not be pleasant, but it was inevitable. To decline or avoid such a meeting would be to give it too much importance. The only reasonable and self-respecting way was to revert to the old family relationship and behave as if nothing had happened to rupture it. That there should be a certain feeling of strain was natural enough. What surprised her a good deal was that this feeling was not in the main a personal one. As far as she herself was concerned, she could go back. She had schooled herself to endure, and then to leave the past behind. She had married James Hardwick. She had to look elsewhere than in her own feelings for the sense of dread.

That Esther had been seriously upset was plain. She had been crying. She cried easily when anything upset her. But the unhappiness which had hung about her like a cloud tonight seemed too deep to spring from any except a really serious cause. Quite obvious that it was Alan who had upset her. Looking back across a three years’ gap, it was not difficult to guess that he had been demanding money. There had never been any end to his asking, but at long last there had been an end to Esther’s giving. Her no had been said with kindness, but with finality and without undue emotional disturbance. There must be something more than money to account for her state tonight.

And Adela-what on earth had come over Adela Castleton? A brief absence in the garden with Alan, and she had returned with the look of an automaton-sitting down at the small table from which she had risen, laying out her patience cards with a kind of stiff precision, her face colourless, her eyes fixed and empty, and in the end sweeping the pack together and getting to her feet to announce that she had a headache and thought she would go to bed.

It was with her departure that there was some slight lessening of the strain. Pippa came in, blew a kiss to the assembled company, said she was all in and had better vanish before she fell asleep in everybody’s face. Then, after a brief interval, Alan to make his excuses.

“It’s quite lovely out on the cliff. You ought to have come, Carmona. Well, Darsie tells me her front door shuts at some extraordinarily early hour, and I forgot to get her to give me a key, so I had better be off. She made a tremendous favour of taking me in at all, and I can’t afford to put a foot wrong. She seems to be full up with old ladies who go to bed at ten. They don’t think men are quite nice, and I gather she is rather stretching a point in allowing one inside the gates. I’ll come up in the morning if I may.” There had been the old careless smile in his eyes as he looked at Carmona.

She went on undressing, putting her dress on a hanger, sliding it on to a brass rail in the immense gloomy wardrobe which took up nearly a whole side of the room. She thought suddenly what a dreary room it was, with its faded carpet, its dun wall-paper, its curtains turned from green to grey by the salty air. It had been Octavius Hardwick’s room, and it came to her that he had probably died there.

She had reached this cheerful point and was slipping her nightgown over her head, when there was a soft knocking on the door. It was followed immediately by the entrance of Pippa in pale yellow pyjamas. She shut the door behind her and said in an energetic whisper,

“If Alan gets himself murdered he’ll only have himself to thank for it! I thought you had better know!”

She then sat down on the edge of the vast Victorian bed and burst into tears.

“Pippa!”

She tossed back her hair.

“Can’t people be put in prison for blackmail?”

“Yes, they can.”

“And what is the good of that? They know damn well you would rather die than go into court and say what it was all about!”

Carmona had come over to stand beside her.

“What is it all about, Pippa? Do you want to tell me?”

The blue eyes were full of angry tears.

“I’ve got to tell someone, or I shall blow up! Spontaneous combustion! People used to believe in it like anything! You just go up in smoke-poof! And all that’s left of you is a horrid smell of burning and some amusing tales about your having been carried off by the devil!”

“Pippa!”

There was another vigorous toss of the head.

“And you needn’t think I’m joking, because I’m not! It’s that swine Alan, and-”

Carmona broke in.

“He’s blackmailing you-”

She found that she wasn’t surprised-that nothing Alan did could surprise her. She had a deep sense of shame.

Pippa said,

“If Bill knew, he would kill him! But if Bill knew, then it would kill me, so what is the good of that? There just isn’t a thing I can do about it, and Alan knows it!”

Carmona sat down on the bed beside her.

“Do you want to tell me?”

“I’ve always told you things, haven’t I?”

“Sometimes people tell you things, and then they wish they hadn’t.”

Pippa shook her head.

“I shan’t do that. You make me feel safe.” She looked piteously at Carmona. “You know, that’s why I married Bill-I always did feel safe with him. People like that aren’t awfully exciting, so you go off and have a bit of fun with somebody else, but somewhere inside you deep down you know perfectly well that you can’t do without them.”

“Yes, I know. The bother is you might go too far and not be able to get back. Is that what Alan is holding over you?”

Pippa nodded.

“I went off for a week-end with Cyril Maynard. Bill said people were talking. We had a row and I thought I’d give them something to talk about. I didn’t care what I did. You don’t, you know, when you’re angry-you only want to score the other person off. Bill had to be away that week-end-some stupid manoeuvres or something-and I went off with Cyril. I hadn’t ever done anything like that before-I swear I hadn’t- but I just didn’t care. We went to Trenton, and we had dinner on the way and danced afterwards, so we didn’t get down there till late. I don’t know why Alan was there, but he was. We didn’t see him, but he saw us arrive, and he went and looked in the hotel register and saw that we were down as Mr. and Mrs. Cyril Smith. And afterwards he saw Cyril go into my room.”