Martha was not sympathetic. Obviously she distrusted him; and, her mind being on the track of an imaginary paramour, she would add a rasp to a life that only mutual indifference had kept smooth. Well, he certainly had suffered some mental disturbance, and, if he had followed anybody it was not a woman, but must have been the easy young man with the silver flageolet. But Martha would never believe it, even though he showed her the instrument and played the bewitching tune. It was dusk when he reached his caravan by the wayside of the plane-tree avenue. His neighbours courteously informed him of their jealous care of his possessions. They had watered and fed the horse, and had guarded the vehicle as though it had been the Ark of the Covenant. Paradyne again bestowed largess on the shock-headed boy. The family sprawled on the grass eating their evening meal. The sight reminded him of his own healthy hunger. He unlocked his door and produced his rough store of food, the main part of which was his sturdy twelve inches of sausage and a bottle of red wine which he discovered with two others, wrapped up for safety’s sake in his golfing knickerbockers. He sat on the steps and ate his supper with an enjoyment that, in his memory, had never attended physical things. He had despised the men who wasted their time and talk on flavours of food and wine. He could not tell old port from new, nor had it mattered to him whether he drank it with walnuts or with mackerel. But that evening a great truth dawned on him. The salty, pungent, garlicky sausage and the new coarse wine were predestined for each other in Heaven’s Buttery. He ate and drank with an almost palpitating joy. He filled his pipe with cheap French tobacco and the first puff or two fell into harmony with the wine and the sausage. Its perfume mingled with that of dust and beasts and the warm September smell that arose in the gathering night from the near city and the vast, environing plain. ‘My God,’ said he, ‘it’s good to be alive.’ And as he said it, his memory flashed back to the inexplicable words of Martha on the night of Viola’s wedding: ‘----it isn’t funny looking after a dead man.’ ‘What the devil did she mean by that?’ he had asked himself. Now came a glimmering of the answer in the form of another question: was he so sure that then, and, indeed, all his life before, he hadn’t been a dead man?