‘He wasn’t far wrong, was he? Well, well – and Frederick is sexton. I must look him up. Let me see – he married one of the Pincott girls, didn’t he?’

Miss Sophy began at once to tell him all about the Pincotts. As there were a round dozen of them, it took some time.

At ten o’clock they went to bed, Miss Brown informing him that he could have a bath, but that he must be careful not to take more than five inches of water. Again that absurd resentment flared. But he had the bath, and getting into bed, fell immediately and rather unexpectedly into a dreamless sleep.

He awoke some time later with a start. The moon was up. The two windows, which had been empty and dark when he had drawn the curtains back before getting into bed, now framed a silvered landscape. The night air was so warm as to give the impression that it was the light that was warming it. He got up and stood at the nearer window, looking out. There was nothing that could be called a breeze – only that warm air just moving against his cheek. Below him the lawn and Miss Sophy’s border lay under the moon. To the right the churchyard wall rose grey behind the flowers until it melted into the shadow of great trees – copper beech, green beech, and chestnut. The shadow deepened away to the left. More trees, with the moon throwing a black image of each on the blanched grass. Lilacs, a tall red thorn, a cedar nearly as old as the church, a single heavy elm – he could still name every tree, though with the light behind them they showed only in silhouette, all detail lost.

He had stood there for perhaps ten minutes, when he saw that something was moving in the shadows – something, or someone. It moved where the shade was deepest. Only the fact that it moved made it visible. But there was no point at which the shadow extended to the house. The moment was bound to come when there would be an alternative of retreat or emergence. Garth watched with a good deal of interest to see which it would be.

The moment arrived, and he saw Miss Medora Brown cross the barrier and stand quite plainly revealed. She wore the long black dress she had worn at dinner, covering her to the feet, to the wrists. Over her head she had tied a black lace scarf, the ends brought round to cover her to the chin. Only her hands showed white in the drowning light – her hands, and her lifted face.

Instinctively Garth drew back, and then stood wondering whether his own movement might not have given him away as hers had done.

She stood for a moment, and then walked quickly and noiselessly forward until she was lost from view. He had by now no need to watch her. He knew very well that she would come in, as he had so often done himself, by the glass door of his grandfather’s study. Only there was a trick with that door. If your hand wasn’t perfectly steady, if there was the least interruption in the slow, smooth pressure which opened it, it creaked on you. He knew now that Miss Brown’s hand had not been steady, and that it was this creak which had waked him. He listened for it, and heard it again. Wherever she had been, she had been quick about it. She couldn’t have been out of the house for more than a quarter of an hour. Well, the show was over and she was back.

He got into bed and lay down. Just as his head touched the pillow, there zigzagged into his mind the recollection of where he had come across the name of Medora.

In a poem – in the title of a poem. One of those long-winded tales in verse which had been the fashion when the nineteenth century was young. He hadn’t the slightest idea what it was about, or who it was by, but he could see the title as plainly as he had ever seen anything in his life:

Conrad and Medora

He jerked up on an elbow and whistled softly. Whether Medora was English or not, there was no doubt at all about Conrad. Conrad was German.

CHAPTER SIX

AT HALF-PAST SIX next morning Garth yawned, stretched, and jumped out of bed. There seemed to have been no interval at all. He had remembered about Conrad and Medora, he had looked at his watch and found the time to be half an hour after midnight, and then he had gone to sleep and slept without a break and without a dream. Funny, because sometimes he dreamed like mad.

Well, now he thought he would get up. The maids had no vice of early rising. Mabel had been house-parlourmaid in Aunt Sophy’s mother’s time, and goodness knew how long ago that was. Florence had cooked the Rectory meals for thirty years. Miss Sophy would get her early morning tea at eight, but very little else would be done before breakfast. He thought he would rather like to walk out into the garden before anyone was up. He felt some curiosity about Miss Brown’s nocturnal excursion, and some inclination to prospect.

He emerged from his room upon a well blacked-out passage and switched on the light at the head of the stairs. He had no mind to rouse the household and provide Bourne with another inquest by taking a header into the stone-flagged hall. The light came on, imparting a raffish air to its respectable surroundings. After the early morning sunlight this synthetic product was all wrong, all out of key. It gave the sedate Rectory stair a horrid up-all-night appearance.

He was nearly at the bottom, when something sparkled at him from the heavily patterned carpet. He bent, and pricked his finger on a sliver of glass. As he dropped it into the wastepaper basket in the study he wondered vaguely who had been breaking what. Then he let himself out by the glass door, and was pleased to observe that his hand had lost neither its cunning nor its steadiness. There was no creak of the hinge for him. He stepped on to the dew-drenched lawn and looked down the garden, as he had looked from his bedroom window in the night. It was the same scene, but whereas then everything had been dreaming under the moon, now it was all enchantingly awake, the border jewel bright, the old wall behind it warm and mossy in the early sunshine. Away to the left the shadows lay across the grass, but now it was the sun that laid them there, and the trees themselves were full of colour and light – the cedar with its cones like a flock of little owls sitting all in rows on the great layered branches, the thorn almost as red with berries as in its blooming time. That was where he had first caught sight of Miss Brown last night – not as Miss Brown, but as something that moved in the shadow of the thorn.

He crossed the garden until he came to the place, and stood there frowning. Perhaps Miss Brown had been unable to sleep – perhaps she had come out to take the air. The answer to that was that he didn’t think so. They had gone to their rooms at ten o’clock. If Miss Brown had made any effort to sleep, she would not still have been wearing a black lace dinner-dress at half-past twelve.

Two or three yards beyond the thorn tree the grey wall at the foot of the garden broke into an arch filled by a door of weathered oak. He lifted the latch, swung the door inwards, and walked out into the narrow Cut which ran at the back of all these houses facing on to the green. It had on one side of it a long, continuous wall which joined one wall of the churchyard at right angles about twenty feet farther on, and on the other a tall mixed hedge. Between wall and hedge there was just room for two people to walk abreast, or for a boy to ride a bicycle. It was in fact chiefly used by errand boys, who found it a short cut. On the right it skirted the churchyard and came out in the middle of the village. On the left it followed the wall until it ended, and then wandered out to join the road which bordered the Green. Five houses shared the wall. Each had a door which gave upon the Cut.

Perhaps Miss Brown had gone out of one door and in at another. Perhaps she had been to call upon one of her neighbours. Thanks to Miss Sophy’s flow of conversation he could name them all – Mr Everton, the retired businessman and poultry expert, in Meadowcroft; the new rector, in The Lilacs instead of Miss Jones; the Miss Doncasters next door in Pennycott; Mrs Mottram in The Haven; and Dr Edwards and his wife at Oak Cottage. Not at all a probable lot, with the exception of Mr Everton, who might for all he knew be in the habit of sitting up till midnight and making assignations with gloomy ladies in evening dress. Hang it all, you couldn’t have much of an assignation inside of ten minutes, which was really all you could give it, allowing for crossing the garden twice. There certainly wasn’t more than a quarter of an hour between the creak that had woken him up and the creak that had signalled Miss Brown’s return.