He laughed again, less histrionically, and rather uncertainly I joined in.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you must forgive my practical joke. But you’ll understand how it amuses me to see what my guests will do when they see that figure. I’ve had a hole made through the hedge to watch. Some of them have been quite frightened. Some see through the trick at once and laugh before I get the chance to—the joke is then on me. But most of them do what you did—start and stop, and start and stop, wondering if they can trust their eyes. It’s fun watching people when they don’t know they are being watched. I can always tell which are the . . . the imaginative ones.’

I laughed a little wryly.

‘Cheer up,’ he said, though I would have rather he had not noticed my loss of poise. ‘You came through the ordeal very well. Not an absolute materialist like the brazen ones, who know no difference between seeing and believing. And not—certainly not—well, a funk, like some of them. Mind you, I don’t despise them for it. You stood your ground. A well-balanced man, I should say, hard-headed but open-minded, cautious but resolute. You said you were a writer?’

‘In my spare time,’ I mumbled.

‘Then you are used to looking behind appearances.’

While he was speaking, I compared him to the figure, and though the general resemblance was striking—the same bold nose, the same retreating forehead—I wondered how I could have been taken in by it. The statue’s texture was so different! Lead, I supposed. Having lost my superstitious horror, I came nearer. I detected a thin crack in the black stocking, and thoughtlessly put my finger-nail into it.

‘Don’t do that,’ he warned me. ‘The plaster flakes off so easily.’

I apologized. ‘I didn’t mean to pull your leg. But is it plaster? It’s so dark, as dark as, well—your suit.’

‘It was painted that colour,’ my host said, ‘to make the likeness closer.’

I looked again. The statue’s face and hands were paler than its clothes, but only a pale shade of the same tone. And this, I saw, was true to life. A leaden tint underlay my host’s natural swarthiness.

‘But the other statues are of stone, aren’t they?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they are. This one was an experiment.’

‘An experiment?’

‘My experiment,’ he said. ‘I made it.’ He did not try to conceal his satisfaction.

‘How clever of you!’ I exclaimed, stepping back to examine the cast more critically. ‘It’s you to the life. It almost seems to move.’

‘Move?’ he repeated, his voice distant and discouraging.

‘Yes, move,’ I said, excited by my fantasy. ‘Don’t you see how flat the grass is round it? Wouldn’t a statue let the grass grow under its feet?’

He answered still more coldly: ‘My gardeners have orders to clip the grass with shears.’

Snubbed and anxious to retrieve myself, I said, ‘Oh, but it’s the living image!’ I remembered the motto on his crested writing-paper. ‘Vayne sed non vanus. I adore puns. “Vayne but not vain.” You but not you. How do you translate it?’

‘We usually say, “Vayne but not empty”.’ My host’s voice sounded mollified.

‘How apt!’ I prattled on. ‘It’s Vayne all right, but is it empty? Is it just a suit of clothes?’

He looked hard at me and said:

‘Doesn’t the apparel oft proclaim the man?’

‘Of course,’ I said, delighted by the quickness of his answer. But isn’t this Vayne a bigger man than you are—in the physical sense, I mean?’

‘I like things to be over-life size,’ he replied. ‘I have a passion for the grand scale.’

‘And here you are able to indulge it,’ I said, glancing towards the great house which made a rectangle of intense dark in the night sky.

‘But service isn’t what it was before the war,’ he rather platitudinously remarked. ‘The trouble I’ve had, looking for a footman! Still, I think you’ll find your bath has been turned on for you.’

I took the hint and was moving away when suddenly he called me back.

‘Look!’ he said, ‘don’t let’s change for dinner. I’ve got an idea. Fairclough hasn’t been before; it’s his first visit, too. He hasn’t seen the statues. After dinner we’ll play a game of hide and seek. I’ll hide, and you and he shall seek—here, among the statues. It may be a bit dull for you, because you’ll be in the secret. But if you’re bored, you can hunt for me, too—I don’t think you’ll find me. That’s the advantage of knowing the terrain—perhaps rather an unfair one. We’ll have a time-limit. If you haven’t found me within twenty minutes, I’ll make a bolt for home, whatever the circumstances.’

‘Where will “home” be?’

‘I’ll tell you later. But don’t say anything to Fairclough.’

I promised not to. ‘But, forgive me,’ I said, ‘I don’t quite see the point——’

‘Don’t you? What I want to happen is for Fairclough to mistake the statue for me. I want to see him . . . well . . . startled by it.’

‘He might tackle it low and bring it crashing down.’

My host looked at me with narrowed eyes.

‘If you think that, you don’t know him. He’s much too timid. He won’t touch it—they never do until they know what it is.’

By ‘they’ I supposed him to mean his dupes, past, present and to come.

We talked a little more and parted.

I found the footman laying out my dress-suit on the bed. I told him about not changing and asked if Mr. Fairclough had arrived yet.

‘Yes, sir, he’s in his room.’

‘Could you take me to it?’

I followed along a passage inadequately lit by antique hanging lanterns, most of which were solid at the bottom.

Fairclough was changing. I told him we were to wear our ordinary clothes.

‘What!’ he exclaimed. ‘But he always changes for dinner.’

‘Not this evening.’ I didn’t altogether like my rôle of accomplice, but Fairclough had the weakness of being a know-all. Perhaps it would do him no harm to be surprised for once.

‘I wonder if Postgate changed,’ I said, broaching the topic which had been exercising my mind ever since I set foot in the house.

‘He must have done,’ said Fairclough. ‘Didn’t you know? His dress-clothes were never found.’

‘I don’t remember the story at all well,’ I prompted him.

‘There’s very little to remember,’ Fairclough said. ‘He arrived, as we have; they separated to change for dinner, as we have; and he was never seen or heard of again.’

‘There were other guests, weren’t there?’

‘Yes, the house was full of people.’

‘When exactly did it happen?’

‘Three years ago, two years after Vayne resigned the chairmanship.

‘Postgate had a hand in that, hadn’t he?’

‘Yes, don’t you know?’ said Fairclough. ‘It was rather generous of Vayne to forgive him in the circumstances. It didn’t make much difference to Vayne; he’d probably have resigned in any case, when he inherited this place from his uncle. It was meant to be a sort of reconciliation party, burying the hatchet, and all that.’

I agreed that it was magnanimous of Vayne to make it up with someone who had got him sacked. ‘And he’s still loyal to the old firm,’ I added, ‘or we shouldn’t be here.’

‘Yes, and we’re such small fry,’ Fairclough said. ‘It’s the company, not us, he’s being kind to.’

I thought of the small ordeal ahead of Fairclough, but it hardly amounted to a breach of kindness.

‘I suppose we mustn’t mention Postgate to him?’ I said.

‘Why not? I believe he likes to talk about him. Much better for him than bottling it up.’

‘Would you call him a vain man?’ I asked.

‘Certainly, Vayne by name and vain by nature.’

‘He seemed rather pleased with himself as a sculptor,’ I remarked.

‘A sculptor?’ echoed Fairclough.

I realized my indiscretion, but had gone too far to draw back. ‘Yes, didn’t you know?’ I asked maliciously. ‘He’s done a statue. A sort of portrait. And he talks of doing some more. Portraits of his friends in plaster. He asked me if I’d be his model.’