He thought for a moment. Then he decided he must pretend he did not understand.

"What characters, miss?" he asked.

"Well, men of an age," she said, "I mean really old men," she said, "who, from what one hears and reads, are more liable to let themselves collapse in that disgraceful way." Then she sheered off. "If I may refer to what is common knowledge, how in the course of your duties you take particular stock of the inhabitants of your own district," she went on with almost a sneer, "then what I am getting at is this, that you should warn us of any such sinister person. Forewarned is forearmed," she said, and gave a really brilliant smile to hide her mounting irritation. He hesitated.

"We've been fortunate round about," he said at last. "I don't think there's been a case of the kind you mention for some years past, ma'am."

"But then, will there never be?" she enquired, assuming a discouraged voice.

"Ah," he said, "now there's a question."

Upon which, her point made, she changed the subject, and, not long afterwards, politely dismissed him.

Winstanley, hastening along a ride, came to where it crossed another. She looked to the right, saw Sebastian with Elizabeth Rock. They were standing within each other's arms, alternately kissing their eyes shut against an azalea in full flower half fallen across the ride. This mass of bloom in the full sunlight was almost the colour of Merode's hair in her bath, a slope of deep golden honey with its sweet heavy scent and a great buzz of bees about; caparisoned with primrose yellow butterflies, some trembling spread wings, some clapping theirs soundlessly together, some tight closed.

"Hey, you two," she called, but then, as she began to approach, and like wings, they came apart, though still holding one another by the hand, she felt such a distress she halted. It was long since she had been kissed like that, and sometimes she wondered if she would ever be again.

"I was just on the look out for you," she continued, in hopes that she had not made a fool of herself, and shown what she felt. But they seemed as dazed as the noisy insect life around, which droned and shuddered while these flowers trumpeted the sun.

"Miss Edge and Miss Baker are back," she said. The others came slowly to her. Beastly woman she's fairly drunk with him, she thought.

"But I'm off," he objected, in what he imagined to be cockney, yet hesitantly, as if he had not entirely found his feet, "I've got the day off, lidy, I'm not 'ere, you 'aven't seen me." And this moment he chose to wink, to cajole her not to speak of what she had just witnessed. She was immediately more than disgusted.

"That excuse would do if this was an ordinary day," she replied. "But there's a bit of a shemozzle on, my children. As you may have heard."

"What's brought them back so bloody soon?" he asked, keeping up the part he had seen fit to choose.

"I was wondering if you'd caught what I said," she remarked, stubbornly.

"Why you don't mean, you can't be trying to explain, what is… it's about Mary, is it?" Elizabeth asked, with dread.

"Oh no, there's no news. It appears their Commissions were postponed, so they came rushing back again, that's all. Evershed says she'll have to cool their car off like a horse. But they've held a staff meeting and you can guess who it was noticed you were absent."

"But gor' love a duck, guv'nor, I'm not on today, I'm tellin' yer."

"I spoke up to tell her, and then that silly ass of a prisoner's friend, Dakers, asked if he should go to find you, even went on to say he happened to know you had slept in after all. But it passed, anyway for a time. The thing is, my lad, I think you ought to put in an appearance."

"That goes for the two of us, then," Mr Birt said in a last attempt to keep up his attitude. "I seen you dashin' about the grounds."

"I made my excuses prettily," she answered, again with some impatience. "There's one of the girls still loose, after all."

"Oh it's my fault," Elizabeth broke out in a wail, while Miss Winstanley observed, not for the first time, how a person's lipstick, when it was smudged halfway to her nose, wounded the whole face like a bullet. "We took what's her name back, you see, then we thought, well it was only natural really, my grandfather's all alone, I had to get dinner, so the thing is, and of course we didn't know they were coming, we just began to walk along but as a matter of fact it was my fault. I know I'm silly but you've heard, haven't you, I haven't been really well, and I asked Seb to see me to the cottage, so foolish when you come to think, as though it was dead of night, in time of course, but then I have been made rather nervous. What I mean is, we none of us know, do we?"

"Don't you fuss, my dear," Mr Birt said in his natural voice, which Winstanley heard so seldom that she was not sure to recognise it, "I'll take you, then I'll nip along and go on duty," he ended, lamely.

"Look Sebastian," the other woman said, "If I were you I'd get there right away. Make some excuse to show yourself."

"But gor' love a duck, what went on, then, at their extry special meeting you're so wrought up about?" he asked, returning to his best cockney, which he knew only from books.

"It was old Edge, "Winstanley told him. "Studying her as I have to I think it was to set her mind at rest. Baker's not much in a crisis. She wanted our support, or so she said. If you ask me, I think she just had us all in to explain what she intended not to do. In other words, to cover herself by being able to say she'd had a staff meeting to discuss 'this unprecedented occurrence', and that we'd all decided, in an ad hoc committee, to proceed on a certain course."

"Which is?" he enquired, in his ordinary voice.

"Why to do nothing at all," she answered. He came out with a disgustingly high, screamed laugh.

"Seb," Miss Rock protested sharply. He broke off at once.

"Well Sebastian, I don't know what else they, or we, can be about. They can't set the girls on to search," Winstanley said. She was distressed. "Well now we're not sure what they'll find, are we? We don't want general hysterics. And they've told the police. Dakers has it for a fact the roads are to be watched within a radius of twenty miles. The sergeant left an hour ago after he'd seen Edge. Besides I believe Merode's told some story which doesn't sound too improbable and is reasonably reassuring." Most of this was false, if Miss Winstanley had only known. The child had said nothing. "But you'd better make a show. I would if I were you. We're all to keep our eyes sharp open, she says."

"I won't ask what else I'm a'doin' of," he commented, "an' in their Park into the bargain, where it will likely do most good," he said.

"No Seb," Elizabeth Rock spoke out. "You're not to… I can't imagine why. . it's so silly after Miss Winstanley's been so kind. Go back at once, I'm sure Gapa would say that, yes, at once, don't clown."

"Look here, let me walk you back," the other woman offered.

"All right then," Birt said, and went off fast towards the Institute, without another word.

"I haven't been quite well, I had a breakdown at work," Elizabeth told Miss Winstanley, as they set out along a great hill of rhododendron twelve foot high with flowers the colour of blood, and the colour of the flesh of bathers in open air in sunless country. Winstanley, as she bent her head to listen, took her companion's hand in hers as a sort of tribute to this woman's being drenched with love. But after a few yards she let go of that hot hand.