“By all means.”

When they stopped the smell and sounds of the plateau blew freshly in at the windows; the smell of sun-warmed tussock and earth and lichen, the sound of grasshoppers and, far away up the hill-side, the multiple drone of a mob of sheep in transit, a dream-like sound.

“Not,” said Fabian, “that there’s very much more to say. The first inkling we had that anything was wrong came on the fifth evening after she had walked down the lavender path. It took the form of a telegram from one of her brother M.P.’s. He wanted to know why she hadn’t come up for the debate. It gave one the most extraordinarily empty and helpless feeling. We thought, at first, that for some reason she’d changed her mind and not left the South Island. Arthur rang up her club and some of her friends in town. Then he rang up her lawyers. She had an appointment with them and hadn’t kept it. They understood it was about her will. She was prolific of codicils and was always adding bits about what Douglas was to do with odds and ends of silver and jewelry. Then a little procession of discoveries came along. Terry Lynne found Flossie’s suitcase, ready packed, stowed away at the back of a cupboard. Her purse with her travel pass and money was in a drawer of her dressing table. Then Tommy Johns said he hadn’t taken her to the mail car. Then the search-parties, beginning in a desultory sort of way and gradually getting more organized and systematic.

“The Moon River runs through a gorge beyond the homestead. Flossie sometimes walked up there in the evening. She said it helped her, God save the mark, to think. When, finally, the police were brought in, they fastened like limpets upon this bit of information and, after hunting about the cliff for hours at a time, waited for poor Flossie to turn up ten miles down-stream where there is a backwash or something.