You are like her, you know. She was a little brown thing too – and she had a brave spirit.’ He looked up suddenly and directly. ‘You must not be sorry, or I cannot talk about her, tonight I have a great desire to talk. I do not know why, but it is so.’ He paused, and then went on again. ‘You know, when there has been what you may call a tragedy – when you have lost someone, not in the ordinary way of death but in some way that puts fear into the imagination – it becomes so difficult to talk about the one that you have lost. There is too much sympathy – it makes an awkwardness. You do not like to speak because your friend is afraid to listen. He does not know what to say, and there is nothing that he or anyone else can do. So in the end you do not speak any more at all. And that I find sometimes very lonely. Tonight I have a great desire to speak.’

Janice felt her eyes sting, but she kept them steady, and her voice too.

‘You can always talk to me, Mr Harsch.’

He nodded in a friendly way.

‘It would be a happiness for me, because, you see, it is the happy things that I would like to speak about. She had a happy life, you know. There was her mother and I, and the young man she would have married, and many friends. She had much love given to her, and if at the end there was pain, I do not believe that it could blot out the happiness, or that she remembers it now any more than you remember a bad dream you had a year ago. And so I have trained myself to think only of the happier times.’

Janice said what she hadn’t meant to say. ‘Can you do it?’

There was a little pause before he answered her. ‘Not quite always, but I try. At first I could not. They were both gone, you see – my wife and my daughter. I had no one to keep up for. When you have someone else to support, it makes you very strong, but I had no one. There was a dreadful poison of hatred and revenge. I will not speak of it. I worked like a man in a fever, because I saw before me the way by which I could take a terrible vengeance.