“Rather excessive in this instance,” she said coolly, giving, she said to herself, snub for snub. Grant moved round and said hurriedly: “I know who you are, now. I didn’t before. We met at Koster Press didn’t we?” Koster Press was the name of his publisher’s house in London.

“For a moment,” Sophy said and then: “Oh but how lovely!”

They were in the basilica.

It glowed sumptuously as if it generated its own light. It was alive with colour: “Mediterranean” red, clear pinks, blues and greens; ivory and crimson marble, tingling gold mosaic. And dominant in this concourse of colour the great vermillion that cries out in the backgrounds of Rome and Pompeii.

Sophy moved away from the group and stared with delight at this enchantment. Grant, who had been left with Alleyn, abruptly joined her.

“I’ve got to talk about this,” he muttered. “I wish to God I hadn’t.”

She looked briefly at him. “Then why do it?” said Sophy.

“You think that was an affectation. I’m sorry.”

“Really, it couldn’t matter less what I think.”

“You needn’t be so snappish.”

They stared at each other in astonishment.

“I can’t make this out,” Grant said unexpectedly. “I don’t know you,” and Sophy in a panic, stammered: “It’s nothing. It’s none of my business. I’m sorry I snapped.”

“Not at all.”

“And now,” fluted Sebastian Mailer, “I hand over to my most distinguished colleague, Mr. Grant?”

Grant made Sophy an extremely stuffy little bow and moved out to face his audience.

Once he was launched he too did his stuff well and with considerable charm, which was more than could be said for Mr. Mailer. For one thing, Sophy conceded, Grant looked a lot nicer. His bony face was really rather beautifully shaped and actually had a carved, mediaeval appearance that went handsomely with its surroundings. He led them further into the glowing church. There were two or three other groups of sightseers but, compared with the traffic in most celebrated monuments, these were few.

Grant explained that even in this, the most recent of the three levels of San Tommaso, there was a great richness of time sequences. When in the twelfth century the ancient church below it was filled in, its treasures, including pieces from the pagan household underneath it, were brought up into this new basilica, so that now classical, mediaeval and Renaissance works mingled. “They’ve kept company,” Grant said, “for a long time and have grown together in the process. You can see how well they suit each other.”

“It happens on the domestic level too,” Alleyn said, “don’t you think? In houses that have belonged to the same family for many generations? There’s a sort of consonance of differences.”

“Exactly so,” Grant agreed with a quick’ look at him. “Shall we move on?”

A wave of scent announced the arrival of Lady Braceley at Alleyn’s elbow. “What a marvellous way of putting it,” she murmured. “How clever you are.”

The doeskin glove with its skeletal enclosure touched his arm. She had tipped her head on one side and was looking up at him. Sophy, watching, thought a shutter had come down over his face and indeed Alleyn suffered a wave of revulsion and pity and a recognition of despair. “I’d give a hell of a lot,” he thought, “to be shot of this lady.”

Sebastian Mailer had come up on the far side of Lady Braceley. He murmured something that Alleyn couldn’t catch. Grant was talking again. The hand was withdrawn from Alleyn’s arm and the pair turned away and moved out of sight behind the junction of two pilastres. Now, Alleyn speculated, was Mailer doing a rescue job or had he something particular and confidential to say to Lady Braceley?

Grant led his party into the centre of the nave and through the enclosed schola-cantorum, saying, Sophy thought, neither too much nor too little but everything well. She herself was caught up in wonder at the great golden bowl-shaped mosaic of the apse. Acanthus and vine twined tenderly together to enclose little groups of everyday persons going about their mediaeval business. The Cross, dominant though it was, seemed to have grown out of some pre-Christian tree. “I shall say nothing about the apse,” Grant said. “It speaks for itself.”

Mailer and Lady Braceley had reappeared. She sat down on a choir bench and whether by some accident of lighting or because she was overtaken by one of those waves of exhaustion that unexpectedly fall upon the old, she looked as if she had shrunk within her own precarious façade. Only for a moment, however.

She straightened her back and beckoned her nephew, who fidgeted about on the edge of the group, half attentive and half impatient. He joined her and they whispered together, he yawning and fidgeting, she apparently in some agitation.

The party moved on round the basilica. The Van der Veghels took photographs and asked a great many questions. They were laboriously well informed in Roman antiquities. Presently the Baron, with an arch look, began to inquire about the particular features that appeared so vividly in Grant’s novel. Were they not standing, at this very moment, in the place where his characters assembled? Might one not follow, precisely, in the steps they had taken during that wonderful climactic scene?

“O-o-oah!” cried the Baroness running her voice up and down a chromatic scale of enthusiasm. “It will be so farskinating. Yes?”

Grant reacted to this plea as he had to earlier conversations: with a kind of curbed distaste. He gave Sophy and Alleyn one each of his sharp glances, darted a look of something like pure hatred at Sebastian Mailer and suggested, confusedly, that an author seldom reproduced in scrupulous detail an actual mise-en-scène any more than he used unadulterated human material. “I don’t mean I didn’t start off with San Tommaso,” he shot out at Sophy. “Of course I did. But I gave it another name and altered it to my purpose.”

“As you had every right to do,” Sophy said boldly, and Alleyn thought the two of them were united for the moment in their common field of activity.

“Yes, but do show us?” Lady Braceley urged. “Don’t be beastly. Show us. You promised. You know you did.”

Kenneth Dorne said: “Isn’t that why we came? Or not? I thought you were to be the great attraction.”

He had approached Grant and stood in an attitude of some elegance, his left arm extended along one of the closure slabs of the schola, his right hand on his hip. It was not a blatant pose but it was explicit nevertheless, and at least one aspect of Kenneth was now revealed. He looked at Grant and widened his eyes. “Is it all a sell-out?” he asked. “Or have I made a muddle? Or am I merely being impertinent?”

A rabid oath, instantly stifled, burst from Major Sweet. He shouted: “I beg your pardon,” and glared at a wall painting of the foolish virgins.

“Oh dear,” Kenneth said, still to Grant. “Now the Major’s cross? What have I said?” He yawned again and dabbed at his face with his handkerchief.

Grant gave him a comprehensive look. “Nothing to the purpose,” he said shortly and walked away. Mr. Mailer hurried into the breach.

“Naughty!” he tossed at Kenneth and then, vindicating Grant to his disconcerted customers, told them he was unbelievably modest.

Lady Braceley eagerly supported this view, as did the Van der Veghels. Grant cut short their plaudits by adopting, with a great effort, it seemed to Alleyn, a brisk and business-like air by resuming his exposition.

“Of course,” he said, “if you’d really like to see the equivalent places to those in the book I’ll be delighted to point them out, although I imagine if you’ve read it they declare themselves pretty obviously. There, in the right-hand aisle, for instance, is the picture so much admired by Simon and, I may add, by me. Doubting Saint Thomas, himself, by Masolino da Panicale. Look at those pinks and the ‘Pompeian’ red.”