US title: In The Balance

Miss Silver, #04

The characters in this book are entirely imaginary, and have no relation to any living person.

The events described in this book took place in the late summer of 1939

MISS MAUD SILVER looked along the crowded platform and felt thankful that she herself was in a through carriage. She was very comfortably settled in her corner, with her back to the engine to avoid smuts and the magazine presented by her niece laid face downwards on the seat beside her. She gazed with amiable interest at the family parties which came and went, hurrying into sight and then hurrying on again. Miss Silver’s mind, incurably Victorian, found an apt quotation: “Ships that pass in the night – ” Only of course it wasn’t the night, but ten o’clock of a sunny July morning. Not that that really mattered, because poetry was not intended to be taken in too literal a sense.

“Ships that pass in the night and, passing, speak one another.

Only a voice and a call, then darkness again and the silence.”

Symbolical of course. She hoped she had the words quite right.

Dear me – what a crowd! Everyone going away on their holidays. She herself had greatly enjoyed her fortnight at Whitestones with Ethel and the children. After the very trying affair of the poisoned caterpillars it had been pleasant to relax in the bosom of an affectionate family. They had sat out on the beach all day, and she had knitted three pairs of socks and a coatee for the baby, a nice plump, friendly child. The holiday had done her good, and the circumstance that there are no caterpillars by the sea had certainly added to her enjoyment.

She watched a stout woman push herself and three children through the crowd with the efficiency of a tank. There was a little boy with something in a basket. He wrestled with the catch, lifted the corner of the lid, and in a flash a black kitten clawed its way out and was gone. Miss Silver said “Dear me!”, approved the slap administered by a competent maternal hand, and lost the group as it surged on in pursuit of the kitten.