As they drove home to the vicarage with Juliet’s bike perched precariously on the roof rack, they passed a school friend of Juliet’s riding home from a gymkhana festooned with rosettes, who gave them a lordly wave with her whip.

‘Just showing off, silly bitch,’ muttered Juliet.

‘10p in the swear box,’ reproached the vicar, but mildly, because he doted on his younger daughter.

As he crossed the River Darrow and took the road up to the moors, he, too, felt a faint dissatisfaction with life. Watching Beresford today had reminded him of his youth on the rugger field. He had been good looking too, and had experienced the same adulation from women and hero-worship from men.

‘Having achieved the ultimate glory of playing rugger for England,’ said an unkind fellow clergyman, ‘Steve Brocklehurst spent the rest of his life in exhausted mediocrity.’

Mr Brocklehurst was also only too aware that another great athlete, David Shepherd, had made bishop. But no such promotion had come his way. No doubt he would be left to moulder away the rest of his life in Pikely, where the adoration of the spinsters of the parish was no substitute for the stands rising at Twickenham. In his more gloomy moments the vicar thought there was a great deal to be said for an athlete dying young, cut off in his prime, rather than growing paunchy and rheumaticky.

Life, however, had its compensations. He was well respected in the district; no local committee was complete without him; he loved his garden and his games of golf, and his vague, charming wife, probably in that order. His two sons, both at boarding school and costing the earth, were shaping up as excellent athletes. Michael was already in the fifteen. Juliet, adorable, insouciant, the baby of the family, could twist him round her little finger.