I said that the speed and accuracy of conjecture on the opposite side were more like second sight. I could not understand how he had managed to trace me and begin reconnaissance all within eight days.

“Of course not! A man can’t see the wood for the trees when he’s sweating with panic. Didn’t you say your Isaac Purvis spotted him on the way back from the badgers to the Long Down and that his course would take him past your cottage? Well, where was my letter to you?”

“On the floor of the passage inside the front door.”

“Plenty of time to steam it open with you stuck in a bramble bush!”

I doubted that. He had not plenty of time — five or ten minutes at the most, and those he would have used to prowl around the cottage and make sure it was empty and unwatched, not to steam letters open. It was not in his character to take unnecessary risks.

Otherwise Cunobel was right. The envelope of his letter had looked a bit untidy, which might have aroused my suspicions if I had known his passion for neatness as well as I knew it now. The visitor had simply raised the flap of the envelope with a sharp knife and stuck it up again. If he had made a mess of the job, he would merely have walked off with the letter and I should have been none the wiser.

I asked Cunobel for his frank advice —as my eldest friend, which I really began to feel he was.

“How are your nerves?” he grunted.

I replied that they seemed to be all right, but were evidently affecting my alertness.

“Sleeping well?”

“Sometimes.”

“Ever occurred to you that you’re doing a public service?”

I wasn’t going to admit that I had once been in a state of driveling terror while walking along a harmless road and had comforted myself with that very thought.

“Well, you are. How many other mistakes has he made, besides that poor postman, which we don’t know about? It’s a bad business, boy. I had a nasty case when I was at the Admiralty. Anonymous letters from a poor devil telling us to make our peace with God because it was his duty to shoot us all. He turned out to be a retired commander who was crazy as a coot and never showed any other sign of it. Special Branch had the hell of a time running him to earth.

“I remember what the assistant commissioner told me. Political assassins — all in a day’s work! Criminal lunatics — bothering, but they reckon to pick ‘em up! What’s a fair nightmare to them is the potential murderer who isn’t a political, doesn’t mix with criminals, doesn’t show any eccentricities. Get at his grievance, and you’ll get his identity! But if you haven’t a clue to his motive and he’s cunning, he’ll tie up a considerable force of men on plain guard duties.

“Now, in a case like yours I think Special Branch would try to trap their man. Use a decoy. In fact do just what you are doing. But they’d never allow it without a copper up every tree. Your method is better, but I don’t like it. You go on staying with me, Charles. He can’t do very much while you’re here. Let’s sit quiet and see if he makes a mistake!”

That was true enough. At Chipping Marton I was seldom alone, and there was no regularity in my movements. That patron of the Bath and West could only watch. He had little chance of attack without being seen. So long as I remained with the admiral, our game was adjourned for refreshments and I could rest.

But rest is in the mind. There was no feeling it. And this was the more exasperating because I knew that for the first time in twenty years I had all the ingredients of happiness. There was a new, dear warmth between Georgina and myself. There was the training of Nur Jehan. There was my delight in the child, Benita — a desolate delight, for I had to emphasize to myself that she was, compared to a man of forty-three, a child. And all this ruined because I could not move without a degrading .22 pistol in my pocket!

Benita had little interest in horses. She could ride, of course. The local pony club had seen to that before she was twelve — leaving her at the same time with a lasting dislike of the revivalist religion of the horse and its female pastors. Aunt Georgina, with her matter-of-fact nineteenth-century attitude, had been an exception. Georgina shrugged her shoulders at enthusiasm and simply laid down the law that a person of sense should know exactly what was going on in his or her stables just as the modern car driver ought to (but doesn’t) know enough to give precise orders to his garage.

So in the country Benita walked. In London, I gathered, never. I could not avoid these casual strolls without inexplicable surliness, and I did not want to. But she very soon spotted my preference for the open, windswept tops of the Cots wolds.

She put down my manner to a curious life and a dangerous war. Georgina had told her that much. Whether she thought I needed an exorcist or a psychiatrist I was not sure, and I don’t think she was.

One afternoon she said to me quietly:

“There is nothing behind you, Charles.”

I had looked back twice when passing along the bottom of a dry valley. The steep sides were clothed with patches of gorse, intersected by runways of silent turf. It was easy to come down from the top in short rushes quite unseen, until the range had closed to ten yards and that intent, dark face was smiling at my back. What went on ahead of me I did not care. The birds would give me warning.

I apologized for my restlessness.

“But you look as if you really expected something,” she said.

“A naturalist always does. The watcher begins to resemble the watched.”

“Are animals afraid all the time?”

I answered that I did not think so — not in our sense of the word anyway — but that fear was never far from the surface, was acceptable and might even be enjoyable. Everything which preserves must in theory be enjoyable: mating, the satisfaction of hunger and the feeding of the young. A hare, for example, obviously triumphs in a narrow escape; you can see self-confidence in the easy gallop. Extreme danger is pleasurable to a few soldiers — even civilized, sensitive soldiers. And aren’t there young idiots in America who drive cars at each other down the center of the road to see who will get out of the way first?

“All the time, all around us,” I said, “Death is making his reconnaissance.”

“But it’s life which you are afraid of,” Benita replied.

“Because I look behind me?” I laughed.

She accepted that as just an unconscious gesture. I behaved as if I were haunted, she said, only because I was continually looking back into my life instead of forward. There was enough truth in the accusation for me to accept it without awkwardness.

But God knew the haunting was real enough! I had always the impression that I was being watched, though I now believe that at the moment I was not. Physically, that is. Death was at his headquarters, collecting the intelligence reports.

Only Benita saw anything wrong with me; her father did not. There was no reason why he should. The link between us —all the link I was admitting — was Nur Jehan. Since the horse fought Georgina and Benita, and Gillon when on his back was too indulgent, only I could begin to school him.

It was never fair to call the vicar impractical. What he lacked was capital, not common sense. He was a most lovable man, unaffected, fully able to hold the respect of his parishioners outside the church and their attention within it. His only worry —a severe worry —was Chipping Marton vicarage, which he could not even keep in proper repair. He was rightly determined that at least the garden should bring in an income to pay for the house.

“My dear Dennim,” he said to me once, “you are a man of the world. You would probably agree that I should be fully justified in turning the vicarage into a guesthouse or in using my leisure, such as it is, to practice some harmless form of commerce or home industry.”