Carmona moved her head. It was the slightest of movements. It said, “No.”

Pippa Maybury repeated what she had said before.

“Something must have happened to him!”

This time it was Carmona’s lips that moved.

“No-he wrote afterwards. The letter came next day. He said he couldn’t go through with it-he wasn’t cut out for marriage, and he was going to join a friend on a horse-breeding ranch in South America.”

“And that was all?” Pippa stared. “Well, darling, I really do think you were well rid of him! He was a charmer and all that, and marvellous to go about with, but when it comes to husbands-” she shrugged and laughed-“well, you know, there’s something to be said for having them solid. After all, they’ve got to run the show, and pay the bills, and do all the unpleasant sort of things like income tax, and washers on taps, and spiders in the bath, and I don’t really see Alan making much of a show of it. Speaking quite frankly, you know.”

Carmona didn’t see it either. She never had. She had always known that if there was anything unpleasant to be done, she would have to do it herself. The thing that had been broken in her was the conviction that Alan needed her. It was a conviction that went right back into her childhood. He was selfish, he could be cruel, he had a fatal knowledge of his own charm and of other people’s weaknesses, but-he needed her. And then when she found out that he didn’t, that he could push her aside and put the width of the world between them, something broke. She said,

“No-”

Pippa gave her a light pinch.

“Wake up, darling! You said that as if you were about a hundred miles away, and the one thing one ought never to let oneself do is to go dreaming back into the past. Fatal! And it isn’t as if you had got left on the shelf, or anything like that. Why, it was no time at all before you married James. To tell you the truth, I didn’t think you’d have had the spirit.”