Back in the great kitchen which the sun, now in another quarter, no longer cleft as with an axe, so that the cookers were visible and shimmered no longer, where windows, opened wide, let in a breeze which, fanning between more trestle tables set high with sandwiches and cakes, carried for some unexplained reason a smell of lemon, Marion sat beside the girls on orderly duties, at rest after the preparations for the Dance, their work finished, side by side over cups of milk coloured tea with an exhausted Mrs Blain.

It was all grey and white, then golden confectionery, and pale, tired, faces.

"Where's my Mary now this great while?" the cook demanded. "I declare I've been so rushed I never missed her."

"Why Mrs Blain," one of them answered "haven't you been told?" The others, dead beat, looked with open distaste at this girl. Only Moira pricked up her ears, who had done the least all afternoon.

"No-one bothers to inform me whatever," Mrs Blain said. She sat over the kitchen table, her chin propped on a hand. "But I won't have Miss Edge in here, she well knows. Baker's different. As you'll not have appreciated maybe, I never had an order for what I'm to get ready this evenin', not a word. If I've done what I have on my own responsibility, it was for you children. But I've had a feelin' nag all along at me. I'd something or somebody short, only I couldn't seem able to set a name, and there you are, it's that girl."

"Didn't you hear?" Moira asked, after a silence." She lost her Dolly."

"Now don't speak riddles, thank you," the cook objected, not knowing what to make of this, and deaf to some gasps the child's remark had provoked round the table.

"That's right enough, isn't it, you others?" Moira appealed, but had no answer. "She always was a one to cry," she said. Mrs Blain fastened onto this.

"She always was a worker, if that's what you mean," the cook announced. "Has she had to go home, then, and in haste?"

"I expect," Moira said.

"Oh why will they make mysteries in this perplexed establishment?" Mrs Blain wearily accused Miss Edge. "When there's a death in the house and a girl has to haste back to comfort her old parents, well, it's natural, surely? As you would do well to remember, Moira. I'm sad to hear this news, that's all, and I can't tell why I wasn't told." She took a sip out of the cup.

Moira made some remark to a neighbour, in order to change the conversation.

"But I don't see what call there was for you to pass remarks," Mrs Blain went on to the child. "I'd go your own way and let others follow theirs. You can't tell how close they was together. Death comes like that, my girl, in every home, as you will kindly recollect next time you sit to my table."

Moira blushed. There was awkward silence.

"Say nothing, do nothing, but with a helpin' hand for them's in need," Mrs Blain ended, with satisfaction.

The cook was not a woman to allow herself to be contradicted, or even corrected, in her own kitchen. Accordingly they could not tell Mrs Blain, or at any rate not yet, not all at once.

Sebastian and Elizabeth came back to the cottage for tea and, as they passed the pigsty, there was no trace of Mr Rock. When they entered the kitchen he was not there either, nor in the living room where the sage kept his letters unopened in a trunk, because Elizabeth took the precaution to look see. She knew he would not be upstairs.

"But he's left the pot, isn't that sweet?" she said. "And done the room out, which is so dreadful. He does make me ashamed."

"I don't know," Birt said. "He's old."

"But that's exactly it, darling," she objected, while her young man switched off the electric kettle.

"When they get beyond a certain point they do as they please," he said, still in his own voice.

"What a lot you know, Seb. At your time of life."

"Well you can't force him to act any different, can you?" he enquired in self defence. "It stands to reason he'll keep himself occupied. You mustn't let his managing the housework be an upset. You've been ill. There'll be plenty of time when you're better."

"But I'm not ill now," she said, almost as though to ask his opinion.

"Of course not." He refilled the teapot. "Sit down," he said, as if he owned the place. "Do you want to eat, because I'd have thought today too hot for food? I feel liverish after the afternoon."

She looked round and round the kitchen, without a word. "But one thing you might say to him," he began. "Liz,are you there? About this Mary." She seemed not to pay the slightest attention. "I've an idea he's being tempted into error."

"My love," she said unexpectedly, in a contemptuous voice.

"You must listen, dear" he pleaded, but she seemed taken up with all the work done by the old man.

"After so many years they get fixed in their notions," he continued. "If you and I have grudges, likely enough we'll cultivate enormous ones later, like goitres over our back sides to weigh us down, dear. And I'm sure now, he's out to make a cardinal blunder."

She glanced at him, lit a cigarette, looked away again.

"He'll report this girl's disappearance, sure to," Birt went on. "He's not said a word, of course, but I can even tell who he'll report to, Swaythling. So he can get his own back on Edge."

"And why shouldn't he, if he wants?" she asked, at her most practical. But she got up and stood by the low window. Her lover saw she drooped.

"It would be fatal," he said, with increasing embarrassment.

"Look, Seb, will you understand, once and for all, I won't have a word of criticism of Gapa, even?"

"But this is not criticism, dear. If you watch someone stumble away into fast traffic, just about to be run over, you don't stand there and not take action, do you?"

She started to write her name on window glass with a forefinger that left no trace, making the trapped bluebottles buzz.

"Dear," she said sadly, "you don't love me, you can't." He got up at once, came to her side. But she turned from him. He stood helpless.

"You can't," she repeated, in a wail.

"We weren't talking about ourselves," he pointed out.

"He is me," she said.

"Then listen to this, Liz please, I beg."

She moved off to the door, watched the copper in its shed. Because she had not walked out right away he felt it was safe to continue, yet was so nervous he fell back on the voice of the sort of lecturer he was not, and which he did not often use when with her.

"Consider for a moment our whole position here," he said. "A complete community related in itself, its output being what is, of course, the unlimited demand for State Servants, fed by an inexhaustible supply of keen young girls. Staffed, as well, by men and women who are only too well aware they can be replaced almost at a stroke of the pen by the State, from which there is virtually no appeal. In fact, we have here a sad bevy of teachers lying wide open to be reinvigorated, as it would be called, by new blood of which, worse luck, there is only too plentiful a supply in the Pool."

Still with her back towards him she laughed.

"Darling, you do do it well," she said. He thought, anyway she seems to listen, and was encouraged to pursue the matter.

"It follows," he proceeded, "that for the present an equipoise can be claimed here. There are, naturally, individual tensions, what one might describe as instances of disintegration or even of centrifugal action, whereby certain appear, now and again, to be flung out into the periphery of outer darkness. In other words we do not always agree between ourselves. Nevertheless I claim that we have a general measure of contentment in spite of what are, no doubt, inherited differences of outlook. To sum up, we exist together to earn a living by teaching others how to gain theirs. By and large we go about it in peace, and so I claim that there is what I can call a condition, which is to say a self compensating mechanism, in, or of, equipoise."