At ten o’clock they all drank tea and went to bed. That is to say, the Miss Tremletts went to bed. Thomasina did not. She turned her light low and sat down to wait, and to count the strokes when the wall-clock in the living-room chimed the quarters. She had made up her mind to wait until half past eleven, and it seemed a long, long time. It grew cold, and colder. The house gathered its silence about it like a cloak. Every time the clock struck, the sound was more startling. Thomasina found herself waiting for it and dreading it. It was like expecting the sudden flare of a magnesium light.

The time dragged unbelievably as quarter followed quarter on the old wall-clock in the living-room below-half past ten-a quarter to eleven-eleven o’clock-a quarter past- She put on her coat and made sure that the battery in her torch was all right.

As the two strokes of the half hour came upon the air, she opened her door and went softly down the stair.

Peter Brandon was quite as angry with Thomasina as she was with him. There were moments during the afternoon and evening when he found himself disliking her to such an extent that he would have turned his back on Deep End and shaken its soggy clay off his feet for good and all if he hadn’t been unalterably convinced that she would get herself into some really horrible mess if he wasn’t there to restrain her. He had been fond of Thomasina for a great many years in the casual, unemotional way of family relationship. He had teased her, criticized her, and quarrelled with her, all without heat, but it was only in the last six months that he had committed the folly of falling in love with her. He hadn’t had the slightest intention of doing it. Somewhere between thirty and thirty-five he intended to marry and have children-not less than two and not more than four, and preferably two boys and a girl. He proposed to be a good husband and father, and to have the kind of pleasant calm affection for his wife which made no demands upon the emotions and conduced to a tranquil atmosphere in the home. The wife had remained a quite nebulous figure-she bore no resemblance whatever to Thomasina. And then he had to go and fall in love with a creature whom he had known in her pram.

When the fact came home to him he told himself that it was a temporary aberration. He had been summoned to Barbara Brandon’s deathbed, and his emotions were not under the usual control. He saw Thomasina being incredibly brave, and when everything was over he saw her heartbroken and desolate. She wept on his shoulder. They were both quite taken out of themselves. But when he went back to London he couldn’t get her out of his head. He told himself that it would pass, but it didn’t pass, it got worse. He began to write her long letters and to look out for the answers. And then all this damnable business about Anna Ball blew up, and when Thomasina came south he could do nothing but quarrel with her.

It ought to have put him out of love with her, but it didn’t. It is quite extraordinary how angrily you can dislike a person with whom you are in love. Peter had moments of cold fury in which he told himself that he never wanted to see her again. As these persisted side by side with a complete inability to stay away from her, his mental state was naturally an extremely uncomfortable one, and as far as possible removed from the placidity of his hypothetical courtship.

When he had walked himself tired he returned to his room at the Masters’ cottage, where he read doggedly by the light of an oil lamp until summoned by old Mr. Masters to the evening meal. Mrs. Masters being absent on an errand of mercy-a neighbour having scalded her hand-they sat down to a tête-à-tête.

“And she may be long, or she mayn’t, there’s no saying with scalds, but I shouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t all a much about little, seeing it’s Louie Gregory that’s been known from a child to be one to cry out afore she’s hurt. Six children she’s had, and was agoing to die with every one of them, and there they all are a-flourishing like weeds, and Louie trying to make out what a time she’s had a-bringing of them up.”

They had scrambled eggs, and Mr. Masters claimed with justice that he made them better than his daughter-in-law did. He was in high feather, and by the time the meal was over and he had lighted his pipe he had got going upon his repertory of old stories, and by way of that to the history of the Everlys.

“And I wouldn’t tell it, not to anyone but you, Mr. Brandon, because it isn’t a thing that ought to be spoken of. There’s those that would come here and ask their questions, but they’d never get no answers out of me. All happened a long time ago and best forgotten, that’s what I say, and that’s what I told him when he come asking, that there Craddock up at the House. And he says, ‘What’s the story, Mr. Masters?’ And, ‘What story?’ I says. And he says, ‘Is it anything about a hand?’ And I says, ‘Lord-who told you that! Have you been a-seeing things?’ I says. Well, he says he might have been. But I didn’t tell him nothing, because it wasn’t none of his business. Stands to reason, if there’s hauntings going on, those that’s doing it wouldn’t want no upstarting strangers a-coming in. Very high-up people they was, the Everlys-kep’ themselves to themselves, very proud and haughty, as you might say. And the three Miss Everlys that was the last of them, they weren’t no different from the rest. I knew them all when I was a lad-Miss Maria, Miss Isabella, and Miss Clarice…”

He dawdled on through his tale of three lonely women in a decaying house and the cousin who came to stay and was going to marry Miss Clarice.

“Only Miss Isabella, she wouldn’t have it. Seems she wouldn’t bear to have her younger sister put over her, and she went out of her head with spite, and it come to murder between them. So when Miss Clarice was dead and Miss Isabella was shut up for mad there was only Miss Maria left, and she lived on there alone in the shut-up house until she died. And they say it’s Miss Clarice that haunts the house with her cut-off hand.”

“Her cut-off hand?”

Old Mr. Masters screwed up his face into a thousand wrinkles and nodded.

“That’s what Miss Isabella did-cut off her hand with the ring on it.”

There was something about the casual way he said this that added to the horror. It was as if it had been repeated so many times as to become a mere shadow of a tale long told. The old voice going on in the old room with the lamplight spilled in a patch of brightness and the shadows black beyond, all heightened the effect. Peter had a sense of the stark facts of human nature against the peacefully flowing current of village life. This horrible thing had happened, and the village had gaped and accepted it, but it seemed they kept away from the place where it had happened. Old Mr. Masters was saying so.

“I won’t say I’m afraid of ghosts, not if they was my own folk and such that’s died lawful in their beds, but I wouldn’t go up round Deepe House in the night-not in that middle part of the house where the murder was, not for a pound weight of gold I wouldn’t. There was a boy that lost his wits and never spoke after, and there was others. Stands to reason Everlys don’t want no one prying in on them, nor I wouldn’t be the one to pry.” He dropped his voice to a croaking whisper. “There was a tramping chap thought he’d get in and sleep there the way they do where there’s an empty house. They say he got up to the window-all cracked it was after the bomb, and he thought he’d pull out a bit of the glass and get in. But when he put his hand to it there was another hand came out of the dark to meet him, and he upped and ran for it through the courtyard and down the drive, yelling his head off.”

There might have been more to say, or there might not. Whether there was or no, old Mr. Masters did not get the chance of saying it, because that was where his daughter-in-law came in, a good deal put about and with views of her own to air on the subject of people who didn’t know enough to tie up a scalded finger without sending for someone else to do it for them.