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gather from him how long or how well you had known Captain Ingpen, but what he made me see was that you disliked him so bitterly that you could not control yourself in his presence. If you had said nothing at all of him to Clive, it only shows us how deeply he felt it for himself. He understands you through and through, doesn’t he, Hester? You are touched, I am sure, by such devotion and such insight.’

The eyes of the Byzantine Madonna were on her as she uttered these penetrating phrases; the old image reasserted itself and Monica found herself wondering at them, the great irises almost encircled with white, so wide, so fixed was their ominous stare; down at her; across at her; as if from high up, as if through the half-pagan, half-sacred darkness of a vast basilica. Stonily, repudiatingly, Hester stared at her and, in all her cruel security, Monica felt as if a rigid hand had been thrust out from hieratic vestments to push her away, to strike her down, to annihilate her. ‘You know nothing about Clive and me,’ said Hester, ‘absolutely nothing. You never have. I am not touched. He had no right to say such things to you and not to me.’

‘No right to defend you? No right to tell his mother that he understood his wife?’ Monica found