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cattle don’t turn out pretty shady if you take a hard look at them. Beaks and dons and poets and every kind of scribbler. Communists to a man.’ Grinton made a brief pause in this extraordinary speech. ‘And they’re not even always after the bloody books. Heads full of letters and diaries and heaven knows what scribblings that they imagine the place must be stuffing with. Damned impertinence. Only a few months ago there was an unnatural woman – heaven knows from where – who said she was writing a book about Ambrose Grinton, a dissolute chap who went messing around back in the Middle Ages among artists and their doxies – beg pardon, Honeybath – and collected rubbish from their waste paper baskets. I wasn’t unfriendly. I even asked her if she ever rode to hounds, and offered to mount her for a good run or two.’
    ‘But she didn’t want to be mounted?’ This came from Hillam, who had appeared to be absorbed in Country Life again. ‘Or not by you?’
    For a moment it looked as if this outrageous equivoque was going to be greeted with a roar of laughter. But then Grinton pulled himself up.
    ‘She was at least a lady,’ he said stiffly. ‘So I don’t follow you.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Sir’ , he added ominously.
    Thus to apostrophize a guest in one’s own house was pretty stiff, and Honeybath hastened to intervene – although it had to be with the first thing that came into his head.
    ‘Having things of high value around,’ he said, ‘can create a great deal of bother with one’s insurance people. I’ve often heard about that from owners of valuable pictures. They’re told they must take all sorts of devilishly expensive precautions before they can get cover. And Appleby and I noticed you had pretty effective-looking burglar alarms fitted to the library windows.’
    ‘Is that so? That must be Dolly. It’s Dolly who sees to that sort of thing.’
    Honeybath had been about to add – as a mere item of general interest – that the exercise had appeared to miss out on the dummy bookshelves in the library. But as this omission might now appear to reflect on Grinton’s wife, he held his peace. Appleby, however, pursued the subject. (So much for his resolve to refrain from fishing.)
    ‘Family papers make another problem,’ he said. ‘A man like yourself, Grinton, is liable to have quite a lot of them – perhaps stretching over centuries. Indeed, you’ve hinted something of the sort. Not of legal significance, or even of much historical importance. But precious in terms of what may be called ancestral feeling and piety. It’s hard to get a cash value set on such an archive, since no marketplace exists for it. Is there anything of that sort in the library?’
    ‘The kennel books.’ Grinton produced this with sudden decision and interest. ‘In fact the entire records of the Nether Barset since it was first recognizably a hunt. My father had a fellow working on the stuff for nearly a year, and I myself had the results bound up in decently tooled morocco. About a dozen volumes, I’d say – and no doubt still there. Not that I’ve made a recce in the bloody morgue for a good many years.’
    This sudden proclamation of Terence Grinton’s notorious and eccentric attitude to his library brought the conversation to a halt. Honeybath thought of asking, ‘All that shifting of county boundaries has pretty well done away with Barsetshire, hasn’t it?’ But as this would sound like the feeblest and most irrelevant of curiosities, he contented himself with walking over to a window and surveying the February scene. And a moment later Dolly Grinton returned to the room.
    ‘Your reliable Denver is on his way,’ she said cheerfully to her husband. ‘The copper on the telephone said Inspector Denver. Does one address him as that, or just as Mr Denver?’
    ‘Definitely as Mr Denver.’ Appleby was impressed by this care for the forms in face of what was, after all, a trying situation. ‘If I were