Mr. Urquhart and Jason seemed as indifferent to his departure as if he had been an inquisitive Guernsey cow who had approached them and then gone off with a flick of her tail. As he walked across the field he had an uneasy sense that he was retreating from some occult arena where he had suffered an irreversible defeat. The stirring of the waters of Lenty was evidently perilous to him!

He found his mother sitting over the tea-table in Roger Monk’s trim house, sewing artificial poppies round her hat.

During their tea together he related all he chose to relate of the hatter’s death. His mother, however, with her accustomed airy directness, like the swoop of a kestrel, pounced at once on the main issue.

“That’s what I wanted to discuss with you,” she said. “What’s going to happen to those Smith girls?”

She gave him one of her sharp, quick looks, full of worldly sagacity and yet full of a kind of humorous recklessness.