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old lady. All right, at the time it looked black against him and I thought he had done it. But now, on due and full consideration, I don’t think he did. Not Smiler.’
    â€˜He was always nicking things and getting into scrapes. The way you start is the way you go on, and you go on nicking bigger things and getting into bigger scrapes. And that’s what happened. Although he’s my own brother, I have to say it.’
    Albert put his mug down on the polished table top, discovered his mistake and moved it to his little table mat, and said reflectively, ‘It’s all a matter of what they call psychology.’
    â€˜Whatever are you talking about?’
    â€˜Psychology. How the mind works. Smiler was what they call compensating for his home life – or rather for the home life he wasn’t getting. No mother and his dad off to sea nine months out of twelve and only us to come to when he was on his own –’
    â€˜And what’s wrong with us? We give him as good a home as anyone could.’
    â€˜That’s just it. As good as we could. But it weren’t good enough, Ethel. He never knew his Mum and he missed his Dad. We couldn’t do anything about that. But he, unconsciously, you understand, tried to. That’s why he went out and about nicking things and getting into scrapes. He was what they call making his protest against what society was doing to him.’
    Ethel sniffed loudly. ‘Well, I must say, that’s the fanciest notion I’ve ever heard. And anyway, conscious or unconscious, he did that old lady and she stood right up in the juvenile court and identified him.’
    Albert rose. His cocoa was finished and now he meant to go out to his workshop and smoke his goodnight cigarette. He liked to sit on his bench and puff away while he dreamed impossible dreams – sometimes like being able to smoke in the parlour and the bedroom, to flick ash on the floor, to put his feet up on anything he chose and, perhaps now and then, to have a bottle of beer instead of cocoa for a bedtime drink.
    He said pungently: ‘That old lady was as blind as a bat! She couldn’t have recognized her own reflection in a mirror! And I don’t believe she ever had twenty pounds in her handbag. Smiler had only ten on him when they nabbed him five minutes later.’ He moved to the door and added, ‘Well, I hope the lad’s found a fair billet for tonight. It’s freezing out.’
    â€˜That poor boy,’ said Ethel. ‘His father’ll raise the roof when he comes home.’
    â€˜When,’ said Albert and went out.
    Albert was right. It was freezing. It froze hard all night. When the first light began to come up over the easterly ridge of the river valley it was to reveal a world laced and festooned with a delicate tracery of frost. The frost ribboned the bare trees and hung from the thin branches in loops and spangles. It had carpeted the grass with a crisp layer of brittle icing, and had frozen the water splashings under the old stone bridge so that they hung in fanglike stalactites, and had coated the small pools and puddles with a black sheeting of ice. It was a rime- and hoar- and ice-covered world made suddenly dazzlingly beautiful as the first lip of the sun showed to strike gleams of white, gold and blue fire from every branch and twig and every hanging icicle.
    The brightening crack of light under the barn door woke Yarra. She rolled over and sat up on her haunches. She tightened the muscles of her long forelegs to ease the night’s laziness from them. She sat, sphinx-fashion in the gloom like an ancient Egyptian cat goddess, her liquid amber eyes watching the light under the door. Although the door was closed, and had not been the previous night, it did not seem strange to her. The door of her hut at Longleat was always closed during the night and the warden opened it early in the morning. She sat waiting for the sound of his feet