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and Cloisonné bowls, enamelled ashtrays and pieces of crystal. The sideboard was loaded with pieces of silver that badly needed polishing, and along the high carved mantelpiece Alice suddenly saw Dundas’s ladies, a dozen or so Dresden figures with tiny waists, tiny fine hands and pointed toes peeping beneath their crinolined skirts. Above them a cuckoo clock ticked sedately. The room might have been a second-rate antique shop. There was an almost magpie miscellany about it, as if nothing had ever been thrown out.
    Alice sat on a period couch covered with a faded tapestry that bore a design of pink cabbage roses. She became aware of Dundas’s voice. ‘Is there no sign of Camilla yet?’
    He asked the question politely, as if the matter of Camilla’s absence were of no great moment to him. His casualness was an elaborate deception of his true feelings.
    ‘Oh, Camilla,’ said Alice brightly. Here was another one who was going to grieve Camilla’s passing. (Camilla’s passing! How had a gloomy phrase like that come into her head?) ‘She’s run off to be married. She left a note for me, but it slipped down and I didn’t find it until after you had gone last night.’
    To her surprise Dundas didn’t say ‘I don’t believe it’ indignantly, as Felix had. On the contrary, he nodded his head gravely, as if the news didn’t surprise him.
    ‘Do you know, I was afraid of something like that. I didn’t like to say so last night, but I had a feeling something had happened. With Camilla it wouldn’t be simple.’
    ‘That’s true,’ Alice agreed. ‘She would want to do it the sensational way.’
    ‘She was a very naughty girl,’ Dundas said in his mild old-fashioned way. ‘In the school she kept no order. The children did as they liked. She persisted in living in that tumbledown house when we wanted it pulled down. As for the rest—’
    ‘What was the rest?’ Alice asked interestedly.
    ‘Why, men, of course. She thought she could behave as she liked with them. She thought they were all willing to be made fools of.’
    Alice understood his disapproval now. He was jealous, of course. Probably he had never approved of Camilla.
    ‘Have you any idea,’ she asked, ‘who this man she has married is?’
    ‘Not the slightest. Though now you mention it I do recall seeing one of those big American cars at her gate the other day. No one here has an American car. It could have belonged to this stranger she seems to have run off with. I admit her behaviour doesn’t surprise me. I realize,’ he concluded wistfully, ‘that she didn’t confide in me.’
    ‘She said something about catching a plane,’ Alice said. Poor Dundas, he was being awfully decent about Camilla’s casual behaviour. ‘Probably it was someone staying at the hotel. You’ll have to get another teacher.’
    ‘Yes. This is really most irregular. We must have someone here when the school reopens next week. But at least now we’ve got the chance to have the schoolhouse demolished.’
    ‘Wait until I’ve spent a week in it,’ Alice pleaded. ‘I like it and I couldn’t afford the hotel.’
    ‘I’m afraid—’
    What he had been going to say was interrupted by Margaretta coming in with three plates of porridge. She set them down and silently waited for Alice and Dundas to be seated.
    Dundas came back to his paternal geniality and said, ‘Margaretta is getting to be a very good housekeeper. Her mother died when she was quite small, and we’ve had one woman after another, but now Margaretta manages herself. Don’t you, dear?’
    Margaretta, her head bent over her plate, did not answer. Alice looked at her badly brushed hair curling on the tender pale nape of her neck. Poor kid, it was a shame the way she was dressed. Her father, she thought, was not a man to notice clothes, but didn’t she care herself?
    Dundas’s gaze was wandering round the room.
    ‘I’ve kept everything the way it was since my wife died, except for a few little