But none came. The proceedings were formal, and brief, too. It was all over inside half an hour.

I noticed Zellaby slip out quickly as the meeting closed. We found him standing by the steps outside watching us emerge. He greeted me as if we had last met a couple of days ago, and then said:

'How do you come into this? I thought you were in India.'

'Canada,' I said. 'It's accidental.' And explained that Bernard had brought me down.

Zellaby turned to look at Bernard.

'Satisfied?' he asked.

Bernard shrugged slightly. 'What else?' he asked.

At that moment a boy and a girl passed us, and walked up the road among the dispersing crowd. I had only time for a glimpse of their faces, and stared after them in astonishment.

'Surely, they can't be -?' I began.

'They are,' Zellaby said. 'Didn't you see their eyes?'

'But it's preposterous! Why, they're only nine years old!'

'By the calendar,' Zellaby agreed.

I gazed after them as they strode along.

'But it's – it's unbelievable!'

'The unbelievable is, as you will recall, rather more prone to realization in Midwich than in some other places,' Zellaby observed. 'The improbable we can now assimilate at once; the incredible takes a little longer, but we have learnt to achieve it. Didn't the Colonel warn you?'

'In a way,' I admitted. 'But those two! They look fully sixteen or seventeen.'

'Physically, I am assured, they are.'

I kept my eyes on them, still unwilling to accept it.

'If you are in no hurry, come up to the house and have tea,' Zellaby suggested.

Bernard, after a glance at me, offered the use of his car.

'All right,' said Zellaby, 'but take it carefully, after what you've just heard.'

'I'm not a dangerous driver,' said Bernard.

'Nor was young Pawle – he was a good driver, too,' replied Zellaby.

A little way up the drive we came in sight of Kyle Manor at rest in the afternoon sun. I said:

'The first time I saw it it was looking just like this. I remember thinking that when I got a little closer I should hear it purring, and that's been the way I've seen it ever since.'

Zellaby nodded.

'When I saw it first it seemed to me a good place to end one's days in tranquillity – but now the tranquillity is, I think, questionable.'

I let that go. We ran past the front of the house, and parked round the side by the stables. Zellaby led the way to the veranda, and waved us to cushioned cane chairs.

'Angela's out at the moment, but she promised to be back for tea,' he said.

He leant back, gazing across the lawn for some moments. The nine years since the Midwich Dayout had treated him not unkindly. The fine silver hair was still as thick, and still as lucent in the August sunshine. The wrinkles about his eyes were just a little more numerous, perhaps; the face very slightly thinner, the lines on it faintly deeper, but if his lanky figure had become any sparser, it could not have been by a matter of more than four or five pounds.

Presently he turned to Bernard.

'So you're satisfied. You think it will end there?'

'I hope so. Nothing could be undone. The wise course was to accept the verdict, and they did,' Bernard told him.

'H'm,' said Zellaby. He turned to me. 'What, as a detached observer, did you think of our little charade this afternoon?'

'I don't – oh, the inquest, you mean. There seemed to be a bit of an atmosphere, but the proceedings appeared to me to be in good enough order. The boy was driving carelessly. He hit a pedestrian. Then, very foolishly, he got the wind up, and tried to make a getaway. He was accelerating too fast to take the corner by the church, and as a result he piled up against the wall. Are you suggesting that "accidental death" doesn't cover it – one might call it misadventure, but it comes to the same thing.'

'There was misadventure all right,' Zellaby said, 'but it scarcely comes to the same thing, and it occurred slightly before the fact. Let me tell you what happened – I've only been able to give the Colonel a brief account yet...'

Zellaby had been returning, by way of the Oppley road, from his usual afternoon stroll. As he neared the turn to Hickham Lane four of the Children emerged from it, and turned towards the village, walking strung out in a line ahead of him.

They were three of the boys, and a girl. Zellaby studied them with an interest that had never lessened. The boys were so closely alike that he could not have identified them if he had tried, but he did not try; for some time he had regarded it as a waste of effort. Most of the village – except for a few of the women who seemed genuinely to be seldom in doubt – shared his inability to distinguish between them, and the Children were accustomed to it.

As always, he marvelled that they could have crammed so much development into so short a time. That alone set them right apart as a different species – it was not simply a matter of maturing early; it was development at almost twice normal speed. Perhaps they were a little light in structure compared with normal children of the same apparent age and height, but it was lightness of type, without the least suggestion of weediness, or overgrowth.

As always, too, he found himself wishing he could know them better, and learn more of them. It was not for lack of trying that he had made so little headway. He had tried, patiently and persistently, ever since they were small. They accepted him as much as they accepted anyone, and he, for his part, probably understood them quite as well as, if not better than, any of their mentors at The Grange. Superficially they were friendly with him – which they were not with many – they were willing to talk with him, and to listen, to be amused, and to learn; but it never went further than the superficial, and he had a feeling that it never would. Always, quite close under the surface, there was a barrier. What he saw and heard from them was their adaptation to their circumstances; their true selves and real nature lay beneath the barrier. Such understanding as passed between himself and them was curiously partial and impersonal; it lacked the dimension of feeling and sympathy. Their real lives seemed to be lived in a world of their own, as shut off from the main current as those of any Amazonian tribe with its utterly different standards and ethics. They were interested, they learnt, but one had the feeling that they were simply collecting knowledge – somewhat, perhaps, as a juggler acquires a useful skill which, however he may excel with it, has no influence whatever upon him, as a person. Zellaby wondered if anyone would get closer to them. The people up at The Grange were an unforthcoming lot, but, from what he had been able to discover, even the most assiduous had been held back by the same barrier.

Watching the Children walking ahead, talking between themselves, he suddenly found himself thinking of Ferrelyn. She did not come home as much as he could have wished, nowadays; the sight of the Children still disturbed her, so he did not try to persuade her; he made the best he could of the knowledge that she was happy at home with her own two boys.

It was odd to think that if Ferrelyn's Dayout boy had survived he would probably be no more able now to distinguish him from those walking ahead, than he was to distinguish them from one another – rather humiliating, too, for it seemed to bracket one with Miss Ogle, only she got round the difficulty by taking it for granted that any of the boys she chanced to meet was her son – and, curiously, none of them ever disillusioned her.

Presently, the quartet in front rounded a corner and passed out of his sight. He had just reached the corner himself when a car overtook him, and he had, therefore, a clear view of all that followed.