To describe Benita herself is even harder. Her true interest, so far as I can explain it, was a sort of sensual geography. She adored her own countryside, upland and valley, whatever the weather. If one imagines a tall fairy or wood nymph —not her appearance, but what would go on in her mind if she existed — then one comes somewhere near Benita.

I do not mean that she was a sort of Rima. Far from it. She was not at all a child of nature. She would have been pretty quickly bored watching squirrels. But if squirrel-watching had been a traditional hobby in the Cotswolds, she would have known all about the people who did it, why they did it and where.

Another example. One might almost call her a trained observer of grass. This undoubtedly started from the pleasure of a young and rather lonely child in feeling the soft Cotswold turf under foot, in watching the life of the valleys through the thin, waving stems on the edge of the escarpment. But it led her on to know the whole range of the grasses and the tastes of sheep and cattle.

And now I find myself describing a collector of scraps of useless information. That isn’t right either. And so I return to my romantic conception of her as a nymph — an entity carrying the collective soul of four square miles of country. I am told that this is all very pretty but that I do not understand parsons’ daughters. All the same, I cannot imagine what induced her to become a commercial artist in London. There was never the slightest chance of her becoming, as Georgina said, a namby-pamby old maid.

During the days which I spent cosseted by the admiral and his Frank, I naturally saw a good deal of Benita and recovered other memories of youth in the amateur schooling of Nur Jehan. I refused to consider the future at all. If the tiger had trusted to that speed of attack which had been so nearly successful at the cottage, he would have got me.

I do not say that I would have welcomed such an end; but I was very well aware that the loneliness of death would make less difference to me than to most of my fellows. The little world into which I had fallen was so superficially pleasant, so real to its inhabitants and yet so very unattainable by me. The remoteness which I felt was not wholly due to the twenty years between myself and Benita. I saw them all as beloved actors upon a stage which I, the single spectator in the vast, lonely auditorium, could never approach. I might have been a cripple. I suppose that in a way I was.

Aunt Georgina seemed in no hurry to return to our suburb. She was just as exasperated as Cunobel by the incompetence of the Gillons in dealing with so valuable and unexpected a legacy as Nur Jehan. On the other hand, she flatly refused to persuade the vicar to get rid of him. Dear Peregrine had appealed to her to come and make sense of the situation, and sense she was going to make even if it meant that she was housekeeper and head groom.

Sitting one evening with the admiral and myself at the companionable hour of the aperitif, she firmly pointed out that the church in ampler days had expected the Vicar of Chipping Marton to keep a horse and carriage and had provided him with a stable and a five-acre meadow. It was absurd to be content with using one as a henhouse and with raising and selling a single crop of hay from the other.

“But the wretched animal won’t stay in the stable except at night, Georgi!” Cunobel protested.

“Naturally he will not. The place still smells of chickens. We shall all take our meals there for a week, Peregrine, if we can attract him back in no other way. Nur Jehan is worth a little trouble. He is becoming known.”

“Great blood and bones, he’s a joke from Badminton to Banbury!”

“I have a very good mind to show him at the Bath and West.”

I ascribed this astonishing assertion to the influence of the admiral’s old Madeira. It was his insidious habit to compliment her on her palate. The old dear tried to surround her with an illusion that time had stood still since 1912. And he could do it. Although his means were limited, his possessions, accumulated during so many years of high command, were luxurious. The study in which we were sitting could have been that of a governor-general.

“He’ll make you ridiculous, Georgi! He’ll slide you off over his tail and then go and sit in the president’s box!”

“But they want to see him.”

“Who told you that?”

“One of the patrons of the Bath and West, Peregrine.”

“Which of ‘em? I’ll get him handed such a rocket!”

“He didn’t tell me his name, now I come to think of it. A big, dark man. Not out of his forties, I’d say, but very gray and rides all of fourteen stone. He asked me if I was Mrs. von Dennim. God knows where he got the von! Charles has never used it since he settled in England, and my husband never did. Most delightful easy manners he had! I must have met him somewhere before.”

“Can you remember where?” I asked.

“Funny you should say that, Charles! I’ve been racking my brains. I’ve seen his face somewhere. Or a brother, perhaps.”

“Shopping? Or the riding school? Or in our street?”

“Somewhere like that. But it’s just a resemblance. I’m sure it wasn’t really him.”

“I think I know the chap you mean, Aunt Georgi,” I went on, for I had to. “He must have gone white. Didn’t he have dark hair and prominent eyebrows?”

“At home?” she replied, rather puzzled. “Yes. Perhaps. But you know how one person reminds you of another.”

“Where was it that he came up to you and started talking?”

“Up above Didmarton, Charles, when I was leading Nur Jehan.”

The admiral had put down his glass and was simmering in his chair. He had even fiercer eyebrows than the false ones worn on occasion by this delightful patron of the Bath and West. My aunt, who had gone a little pale, for once looked at him more in appeal than command.

“I won’t!” Cunobel shouted. “It’s obvious why the boy is asking questions. Damn silly this silence, I call it! Blast!”

“My dear Charles,” said my aunt, recovering her usual composure, “the Dennims have always had an exasperating habit of protecting their womenfolk, and we all know very well that when you choose to carry on like a lot of knight errants polishing their boots in a heavy silence there is nothing whatever we can do about it. I will leave it at that, merely saying that I have not for one moment believed in your squirrels.”

I pretended to misunderstand. I pointed out that my observations were generally held to be accurate and my theories interesting though debatable.

“All this beating about the bush!” the admiral thundered. “You let me deal with this in my own way, Georgi! Damn it, I’m the oldest friend the boy has got, and I could tell you all about his type when I was a snotty! Your aunt means that she knows the bomb was meant for you, and that’s why you went off to your Warren!”

Quite absurd, I said. If I had thought the bomb was meant for me, I should have stayed at home under police guard instead of exposing myself in the country. And anyway what earthly motive could there be?

“Both of us know the motive as well as you do.”

“Peregrine!” my aunt appealed.

“I will not shut up, Georgi. Never heard anything like it in my life! All this devotion to each other and never going near the facts! Sacred teeth, boy, I’ve had the girl in tears!”

Georgina in tears was unthinkable. But I still did not know where I was.

“I give you my word of honor, sir, that I do not know any reason for wanting to kill me,” I said. “And if either of you do, please tell me.”

“Obviously revenge — with a past like yours!”

Georgina took command.

“When you came out of hospital, Charles, I had a talk with your Colonel Parrow. I have never mentioned it to you. We both thought it best that you should forget.”

The unthinkable was true before my eyes. She was in tears.