Overture to Death by Ngaio Marsh Page A

quite
. Did you hear what she said about our not calling?”
    “I was within an ace of telling her that I understood she received men only.”
    “But, Miss Campanula,” said Dinah, “we don’t know there’s anything more than friendship between them, do we? And even if there is, it’s their business.”
    “Dinah,
dear
!” said Miss Prentice.
    “As a priest’s daughter, Dinah — ” began Miss Campanula.
    “As a priest’s daughter,” said Dinah, “I’ve got a sort of idea charity is supposed to be a virtue. And, anyway, I think when you talk about a parson’s family it’s better not to call him a priest. It sounds so scandalous, somehow.”
    There was a dead silence. At last Miss Campanula rose to her feet.
    “I fancy my car is waiting for me, Eleanor,” she said. “So I shall make my adieux. I am afraid we are neither of us intelligent enough to appreciate modern humour. Good-night.”
    “Aren’t we driving you home?” asked Dinah.
    “Thank you, Dinah, no. I ordered my car for six, and it is already half-past. Good-night”

CHAPTER FIVE
Above Cloudyfold
    i
    The next morning was fine. Henry woke at six and looked out of his window at a clear, cold sky with paling stars. In another hour it would begin to get light. Henry, wide awake, his mind sharp with anticipation, leapt back into bed and sat with the blankets caught between his chin and his knees, hugging himself. A fine winter’s dawn with a light frost and then the thin, pale sunlight. Down in the stables they would soon be moving about with lanthorns to the sound of clanking pails, shrill whistling, and boots on cobblestones. Hounds met up at Moorton Park to-day, and Jocelyn’s two mounts would be taken over by his groom to wait for his arrival by car. Henry spared a moment to regret his own decision to give up hunting. He had loved it so much: the sound, the smell, the sight of the hunt. It had all seemed so perfectly splendid until one day, quite suddenly as if a new pair of eyes had been put into his head, he had seen a mob of well-fed expensive people, with red faces, astraddle shiny quadrupeds, all whooping ceremoniously after a very small creature which later on was torn to pieces while the lucky ones sat on their horses and looked on, well satisfied. To his violent annoyance, he had found that he could not rid himself of this unlovely picture and, as it made him feel slightly sick, he had given up everything but drag-hunting. Jocelyn had been greatly upset and had instantly accused Henry of pacifism. Henry had just left off being a pacifist, however, and assured his father that if England was invaded he would strike a shrewd blow before he would see Cousin Eleanor raped by a foreign mercenary. Hugging his knees, he chuckled at the memory of Jocelyn’s face. Then he gave himself four minutes to revise the conversation he had planned to have with Dinah. He found that the thought of Dinah sent his heart pounding, just as it used to pound in the old days before he took his first fence. “I suppose I’m hunting again,” he thought, and this primitive idea gave him a curiously exalted sensation. He jumped out of bed, bathed, shaved and dressed by lamplight, then he stole downstairs out into the dawn.
    It’s a fine thing to be abroad on Dorset hills on a clear winter’s dawn. Henry went round the west wing of Pen Cuckoo. The gravel crunched under his shoes and the dim box-borders smelt friendly in a garden that was oddly remote. Familiar things seemed mysterious as if the experience of the night had made strangers of them. The field was rimed with silver, the spinney on the far side was a company of naked trees locked in a deep sleep from which the sound of footsteps among the dead leaves and twigs could not awaken them. The hillside smelt of cold earth and frosty stones. As Henry climbed steeply upwards, it was as if he left the night behind him down in Pen Cuckoo. On Cloudyfold, the dim shapes took on some resolute form and became