Yet still they reconnected and were twins again. Though Emmeline was not the same twin as before, and this was something Adeline did not immediately know.

At the beginning there was only the delight of reunion. They were inseparable. Where one went, the other followed. In the topiary gardens they circled around the old trees, playing endless games of now-yousee-me-now-you-don't, a repetition of their recent experience of loss and rediscovery that Adeline never seemed to tire of. For Emmeline, the novelty began gradually to wear off. Some of the old antagonism crept in. Emmeline wanted to go one way, Adeline the other, so they fought. And as before, it was usually Emmeline who gave in. In her new, secret self, she minded this.

Though Emmeline had once been fond of Hester, she didn't miss her now. During the experiment her affection had waned. She knew, after all, that it was Hester who had separated her from her sister. And not only that, but Hester had been so taken up with her reports and her scientific consultations that, perhaps without realizing it, she had neglected Emmeline. During that time, finding herself in unaccustomed solitude, Emmeline had found ways of distracting herself from her sorrow. She discovered amusements and entertainments that she grew to enjoy for their own sake. Games that she did not expect to give up just because her sister was back.

So it was that on the third day after the reunion, Emmeline abandoned the lost-and-found game in the topiary garden and wandered off to the billiards room, where she kept a pack of cards. Lying on her stomach in the middle of the baize table, she began her game. It was a version of solitaire, but the simplest, most childish kind. Emmeline won every time; the game was designed so that she couldn't fail. And every time she was delighted.

Halfway through a game, she tilted her head. She couldn't exactly hear it, but her inner ear, which was tuned constantly to her twin, told her Adeline was calling her. Emmeline ignored it. She was busy. She would see Adeline later. When she had finished her game.

An hour later, when Adeline came storming into the room, eyes screwed tight with rage, there was nothing Emmeline could do to defend herself. Adeline clambered onto the table and, hysterical with fury, launched herself at Emmeline.

Emmeline did not raise a finger to defend herself. Nor did she cry. She made not a sound, neither during the attack nor when it was all over.

When Adeline's rage was spent, she stood for a few minutes watching her sister. Blood was seeping into the green baize. Playing cards were scattered everywhere. Emmeline was curled into a ball, and her shoulders were jerkily rising and falling with her breath.

Adeline turned her back and walked away.

Emmeline remained where she was, on the table, until John came to find her hours later. He took her to the Missus, who washed the blood out of her hair, put a compress on her eye and treated her bruises with witch hazel.

"This wouldn't have happened when Hester was here," she commented. "I do wish I knew when she was coming back." "She won't be coming back," John said, trying to contain his annoyance. He didn't like to see the child like this either.

"But I don't see why she would have gone like that. Without a word. Whatever can have happened? Some emergency, I suppose. With her family…"

John shook his head. He'd heard this a dozen times, this idea the Missus clung to, that Hester would be coming back. The whole village knew she would not come back. The Maudsleys' servant had heard everything. She professed to have seen it, too, and more besides, and by now it was impossible that there was a single adult in the village who did not know for a fact that the plain-faced governess had been carrying on an adulterous affair with the doctor.

It was inevitable that one day rumors of Hester's "behavior" (a village euphemism for misbehavior) should reach the ears of the Missus. At first she was scandalized. She refused to entertain the idea that Hester-her Hester-could have done such a thing. But when she reported angrily to John what was being said, he only confirmed it. He had been at the doctor's that day, he reminded her, collecting the child. He had heard it directly from the housemaid. On the very day it occurred. And besides, why would Hester have left so suddenly, without warning, if something out of the ordinary hadn't occurred?

"Her family," the Missus stammered, "an emergency…"

"Where's the letter, then? She'd have written, wouldn't she, if she meant to come back? She'd have explained. Have you had a letter?" The Missus shook her head. "Well then," finished John, unable to keep the satisfaction from his voice, "she's done something that she didn't ought to, and she won't be coming back. She's gone for good. Take it from me."

The Missus went round and around it in her head. She didn't know what to believe. The world had become a very confusing place.

GONE!

Only Charlie was unaffected. There were changes, of course. The proper meals that under Hester's regime had been placed outside his door at breakfast, lunch and dinner became occasional sandwiches, a cold chop and a tomato, a bowl of congealed scrambled egg, appearing at unpredictable intervals, whenever the Missus remembered. It didn't make any difference to Charlie. If he felt hungry and it was there, he might eat a mouthful of yesterday's chop, or a dry end of bread, but if it wasn't there he wouldn't, and his hunger didn't bother him. He had a more powerful hunger to worry about. It was the essence of his life and something that Hester, in her arrival and in her departure, had not changed.

Yet change did come for Charlie, though it had nothing to do with Hester.

From time to time a letter would come to the house, and from time to time someone would open it. A few days after John-the-dig's comment about there having been no letter from Hester, the Missus, finding herself in the hall, noticed a small pile of letters gathering dust on the mat under the letter box. She opened them.

One from Charlie's banker: was he interested in an investment opportunity…?

The second was an invoice from the builders for the work done on the roof.

Was the third from Hester?

No. The third was from the asylum. Isabelle was dead.

The Missus stared at the letter. Dead! Isabelle! Could it be true? Influenza, the letter said.

Charlie would have to be told, but the Missus quailed at the prospect. Better talk to Dig first, she resolved, putting the letters aside. But later, when John was sitting at his place at the kitchen table and she was topping up his cup with fresh tea, there remained no trace of the letter in her mind. It had joined those other, increasingly frequent, lost moments, lived and felt but unrecorded and then lost. Nevertheless, a few days later, passing through the hall with a tray of burnt toast and bacon, she mechanically put the letters on the tray with the food, though she had no memory at all of their contents.

And then the days passed and nothing seemed to happen at all, except that the dust got thicker, and the grime accumulated on the windowpanes, and the playing cards crept farther and farther from their box in the drawing room, and it became easier and easier to forget that there had ever been a Hester.

It was John-the-dig who realized in the silence of the days that something had happened.

He was an outdoors man and not domesticated. Nevertheless he knew that there comes a time when cups cannot be made to do for one more cup of tea without being first washed, and he knew moreover that a plate that has held raw meat cannot be used straight after for cooked. He saw how things were going with the Missus; he was no fool. So when the pile of dirty plates and cups piled up, he would set to and do the washing up. It was an odd thing to see him at the sink in his Wellington boots and his cap, so clumsy with the cloth and china where he was so adroit with his terra-cotta pots and tender plants. And it came to his attention that the number of cups and plates was diminishing. Soon there would not be enough. Where was the missing crockery? He thought instantly of the Missus making her haphazard way upstairs with a plate for Master Charlie. Had he ever seen her return an empty plate to the kitchen? No.