As she met his look she knew just how useless it was. He laughed lightly.

“It’s going to give me a good deal of pleasure to see Catherine in the dock.”

The words hit her like a blow. He had stirred the past, played on her feelings, even for a moment reached out to touch her with the old charm. And now this. If he had actually struck her in the face, it would have been no more of a stinging shock. Rietta’s anger broke. Afterwards she couldn’t remember what she said. The words sprang up out of her anger and she flung them at him. If she had had anything in her hand she might have flung that too.

And then suddenly she was afraid of her own anger. It came up out of the past, and she was afraid of it. She said in a choked voice,

“I’ll go.”

When she had said that, Catherine drew back from the glass. She stepped down into the bushes out of which she had come. She saw the curtains pulled back and the door wrenched open. Rietta Cray ran down the steps, bareheaded, in her red dress.

She opened her own door and went in. All the way back she had met no one, heard nothing. Her anger was so hot in her that she did not miss the coat, lying where she had dropped it in the study at Melling House. She did not remember it or think of it at all. She thought about Carr, she thought about Catherine, she thought about her own quick anger and was aghast.

She opened the door of the living-room and went in. Fancy looked up, yawning.

“You’ve missed the nine o’clock news.”

Instinctively Rietta glanced at the clock, an old round wall-clock hanging on the chimney breast. It was twenty past nine. A dance band was swinging the latest song hit. She put out her hand and switched it off.

“Has Carr come back?”

Fancy yawned again. She really had lovely teeth, as white as milk and as even as peas in a pod.

“No, he hasn’t. What’s the matter with him, Miss Cray?”

Rietta came and stood over her, tall and frowning.

“I want you to tell me what happened-when I was out of the room.”

The large blue eyes blinked up at her. There was an obvious attempt to control another yawn. Rietta thought with exasperation that the creature looked exactly like a sleepy child. You couldn’t blame her for it, but it wasn’t a situation in which a child was going to be much use. She said,

“I want you to tell me just what happened whilst I was at the telephone.”

“Well-” the eyes remained wide and a little unfocussed- “I don’t know that anything happened-much. Not till the end.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, we were looking at those papers-the ones Mr. Ainger brought-and I’d seen a hat I liked, and I was thinking about how I could copy it, so I wasn’t taking a lot of notice- you don’t when you’re thinking about something special. And all at once there was Carr, calling out. I thought he must have been stung or something. He looked awful, Miss Cray, he really did. And he said, ‘The damned swine!’ and I said, ‘Where?’ because I didn’t know what he meant-I don’t see how I could. And then you came in, and he said that piece about its being the man who took Marjory away-in the picture he was looking at-and he asked you if it was James Lessiter. Marjory was his wife, wasn’t she? I mean, she was Carr’s wife, and that James Lessiter went off with her. Carr won’t do anything silly, will he?”

Rietta said, “No,” in a deep, determined voice. It seemed to surprise Fancy a little. She blinked.

“Well, you can’t pick up spilt milk again, can you?”

Rietta said, “No.”

Fancy yawned.

“By what I’ve heard she wasn’t much loss, was she?” Then she blinked again. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to have said that. You weren’t fond of her, were you?”

“No, I wasn’t fond of her.”

“By all accounts nobody was. I expect Carr got a bit of a jolt with her. He’s kind of-nice, isn’t he? When I told Mum about him she said she reckoned he’d had his feelings pretty badly hurt. She told me to look out and be careful. ‘Have him if you want to, Ducks, or don’t have him if you don’t want to, but don’t play him up.’ That’s what Mum said.”

“And which are you going to do?”

At any other time there might have been sarcasm in the question. At this moment Rietta put it with complete simplicity, and with equal simplicity Fancy answered her.

“He doesn’t want me. He said we wouldn’t fit in. I think he likes that girl where he took me to tea-that Elizabeth Moore. He was fond of her, wasn’t he?”

“A long time ago.”

“Why didn’t he marry her?”

“He met Marjory.”

Fancy nodded.

“She was the sort who’d snatch. I only really met her once, but you could see how she was. Oh, Miss Cray, whatever have you done to your hand-it’s all over blood!”

Rietta glanced down at her right hand. It was astonishing how much blood had come from that small scratch. Up at Melling House she had wrapped James Lessiter’s handkerchief about it. It must have dropped whilst they were talking, and the bleeding had started again. It was dry now, but what a mess. She went down the passage to the lavatory and held it under the cold tap until the stain was gone.

Elizabeth Moore sat with a book on her lap, but she wasn’t reading. She had turned off the wireless after listening to the headlines of the nine o’clock news. Her mind refused to leap the Atlantic, the Channel, traverse the wastes of Europe and Asia, and concern itself with the follies which men were perpetrating hundreds of thousands of miles away. There are moments when the world contracts to what is happening to one person. Elizabeth ’s world had so contracted. There was only one person it it-Carr. She herself was present only as a striving against pain. Fancy hovered vaguely as a threat. But Carr wandered alone in that small, empty world. He was in torment, and she couldn’t go to him, or touch him, or help him. A line came to her from her schooldays:

“Yes: in the sea of life enisl’d…

We mortal millions live alone.”

And it was true-when it came down to brass tacks you had to work things out for yourself. Another line came to her, from the Bible this time, full of haunting melancholy beauty: “No man can save his brother, nor make agreement unto God for him, for it cost more than that to redeem their souls, so that he must let it alone for ever.”

It was on this that she stretched out her hand to the bookcase without even looking to see what book it was that she had taken. It lay open upon her lap, and it was just white paper and black print, as dead to her as if the script had been Phoenician.

She did not know whether the time was long or short before she heard the tapping on the window. The room was at the back of the house. She lifted the curtain and saw only the black night pressing up against the glass like another curtain. Then in the dark something moved. A hand came up to knock again. Carr said her name.

It was a casement window with a low sill. She threw it wide, and he came in and pulled it to behind him. She let the curtain fall into its place, and saw his ghastly look, his shaking hands. They caught at her and held her, weighing her down until she came to a chair and dropped upon it. Then he was on his knees, his head against her, his whole body shaken. It was as if they had stumbled through the everyday crust into a dream where the most fantastic things are as natural as the drawing of one’s breath. She put her arms round him and held him until the shuddering died down and he was still, his head against her breast, her arms holding him. She knew that she had said his name, and that he had repeated hers over and over like a cry for help. If there had been other words, she did not know. They were in her thought, they beat with her blood, but she did not know if they passed her lips, or whether they reached him without sound on a pure tide of comforting love.