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at that time o’ night.’
    Miss Unwin felt the prevaricating words as if they were so many knots in a noose being tied round her neck. She realised, too, that there was nothing she could do to rebut them. Joseph was asserting that he had not seen Mr Thackerton dead. She knew perfectly well that he had. He had blurted out to her the very words ‘stabbed’ and ‘murdered’. But she could not prove he had done so. It was at best his word against hers.
    And Sergeant Drewd, for whatever reasons, seemed a great deal more inclined to believe Joseph than to believe her.
    She straightened her shoulders.
    ‘Well, Sergeant,’ she said, ‘there’s your plain statement, unaffected by anything I might have said to influence it. You have heard it said that no one saw Mr Thackerton dead before I entered the library. You yourself pointed to the stain of blood here on my sleeve. Are you going to arrest me now for Mr Thackerton’s murder?’
    Sergeant Drewd stood in front of her, a confidently diminutive figure. He twirled once at his wax-pointed military moustache.
    ‘No, miss,’ he said. ‘I have no intention whatsoever of arresting you.’
    At his words there happened to Miss Unwin something that had not in the whole course of a life of painfully raising herself up by her own efforts ever happened to her before. A sudden grey dizziness swirled up within her.
    She had only just time to think to herself /
am going to faint
, only just time to hear as from a far distance a voice oddly echoing aloud the very words she had thought in her head, before blackness overwhelmed her.
    ‘She is going to faint. Catch her one of you. Quick. Quick.’
    It had seemed to be, of all people, Mrs Thackerton, the aged-before-her-time, afflicted, new-made widow, who had seen whatwas about to happen and had called out, in a voice a good deal stronger than she had shown herself capable of using in all those afternoons of reading aloud.
    But this was a thought that had scarcely impinged before the swirling darkness had blotted everything out.
    Miss Unwin did not remain unconscious for long.
    It must, she decided, have been only a minute or so before she had some notion of herself being helped out of the dining-room in the sturdy grasp of Vilkins, of being half-carried up the stairs by those same rough arms.
    She was in full possession of her faculties, certainly, when Vilkins, with clumsy carefulness, laid her down on her own bed and began to loosen her dress.
    ‘It’s all right, Vilkins,’ she said. ‘I – I feel better now. I can manage.’
    ‘Oh, lawks, Unwi – Oh, lawks, miss, I ain’t half glad to hear your voice, that I am. Are you really in the land o’ the living again?’
    Miss Unwin found herself smiling.
    ‘I don’t think I was ever out of that land,’ she said. ‘Though I did faint. For the first time in my life.’
    She smiled again.
    ‘Fainting,’ she said. ‘That would never have done for us when we were little, would it? We learnt to be tougher than that, didn’t we?’
    ‘We did an’ all. If we didn’t never learn nothing else.’
    Cautiously Miss Unwin swung her legs off the bed and managed to heave herself up to sit on its edge.
    ‘Well, I suppose if I was going to faint I had reason enough,’ she said. ‘It cannot happen to everyone to hear themselves accused of murder.’
    ‘Why, no more it can’t. An’ what that devil of a Sergeant wanted to go a-doing that for is more nor I can say. But you didn’t faint away when you heard that, you know. You had more of the old work’us spirit in you nor that.’
    ‘Well, perhaps I did. But nevertheless I had good cause to faint then, I think.’
    ‘P’raps you did. P’raps you did. That Sergeant turning on you like that. Why, I almost believed –’
    Poor Vilkins came to an abrupt halt and looked every which way in confusion.
    Miss Unwin gave her a sad smile.
    ‘You almost believed, dear Vilkins, that your aid friend had committed that terrible crime,’ she