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on it, just below the hairline. Her earlobes looked pink and waxy seen from this angle, somehow improbable; ruby-coloured drops of glass dangled from them and seemed to shiver in the light. Words continued to issue from the front part of this head: “It’s just like Scott of the Antarctic, he left his wife alone for months and years while he went looking for the South Pole …”
    One moment the words were there, in the space before her. Then, quite suddenly, the sound of them diminished, receded. A sort of throbbing hush descended on me, as if something had been pressed over my ears. I was still looking intently at Miss Lily’s undefended nape and the shape of her skull under the hair. Then she turned in her chair a little, as if to glance round. I had a moment of giddiness and the hush was broken, sounds started coming again, occupying all the room. I moved round to the side of the table. I felt no anger at all now, only a sort of surprise.
    “I read about it in the paper,” Miss Lily said.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, “what was it you read about?”
    “This rumour that she had an affair while he was away in the frozen wastes. His son was asked about it and he said it was absolutely untrue and slanderous because his mother was not that sort of woman. What sort of woman did he mean?”
    Her voice had risen. I looked at her face and saw that she was flushed. “What did he
mean
?”
    This sudden annoyance over an issue so trivial seemed absurd to me and went a good way to restoring my feeling of being altogether on a higher plane than Miss Lily. I could not understand how I had allowed myself to get so upset. After all, from Avon Secretarial Services, what could one expect? She was light-years from appreciating that for a bright angel like Horatio, praise was manna, it was essentialnourishment, essential combustion, he fed and blazed, like the sun. No good trying to explain this to her, she was still talking about the wretched explorer. Where did Scott come into it, a person only remembered for the manner of his death? Scott was not a hero. Heroes
succeed
.
    “He probably didn’t know what he meant himself,” she said, more quietly. “Years ago I read it, and it always sticks in my mind.”
    I decided to let her go early. It was too late now to start dictating. Besides, the mood was wrong. This time when I went to get her coat, the parallels stayed in place: she was still busy when I returned, putting her things into the bag. I waited until we were at the door. Then, quite casually, I put the question to her. “How did you know I had been in the basement?”
    “In the basement?” She looked puzzled, but this could well have been a pretence.
    “When you arrived this evening, when I came to answer the bell, you said I had come up the stairs too quickly. I have been wondering—how did you know I had come up the stairs? Was it just because I seemed out of breath?”
    “Oh, that,” she said. “Well, yes, you did seem a bit breathless as a matter of fact, but I would have known anyway. These dark evenings, before you come to answer the door you always put the light on in the passage, and anyone standing on the top step outside, if they look up at the glass panel over the door, they can see a sort of shadow passing over it. If the shadow comes from the right—my right as I am standing there—it means you must have come up from the basement. If it comes from the other side, you have been in your study or the sitting room.”
    She was standing immediately below me, on the bottom step. Light from the passage behind fell upon her face. She was smiling as she looked up at me. Not a broad smile, just a sort of deepening of herusual expression. “How funny you should remember,” she said. She seemed pleased, I couldn’t quite see why.
    “You are quite a Sherlock Holmes,” I said. “Female version, I mean.” I realized now, as I looked down at her, that Miss Lily had been tested back there in my study, that she