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.’‘I suppose he didn’t tell her-he may not have thought it necessary,’‘But she told me that he was in the house when she went out to evening service at the chapel and when she came back he had gone without leaving any message.She didn’t know what to do about the meal.’‘Well, he is a grown man,’ said Miss Clovis with a bark of laughter.‘I’d always imagined he might break out sometime,’‘You don’t think it could be anything like that, do you?’Miss Lydgate looked worried.‘I am fifteen years older than he is and have always felt responsible for him.Mother always used to say that he was weak.’‘He may just have gone out to the cinema,’ said Miss Clovis reassuringly, ‘but if you’re anxious let’s pay him a surprise visit.He will surely be back now, twenty-four hours later.’‘Yes, let’s do that.We’ll go on the bus.’As they got out of the bus and walked along the road, they heard a number of explosions, some in the distance, others startlingly near, and once the night sky was illuminated by a rocket which broke in a shower of green and golden stars.There was a smell of gunpowder in the cool frosty air.‘Why, it’s Guy Fawkes night,’ said Miss Clovis, ‘what fun!’‘I hardly think that Alaric will be celebrating it in any way,’ said Miss Lydgate, as they walked up the path to his front door.‘I don’t know about that,’ said Miss Clovis, peering round the side of the house.‘It looks almost as if he has a bonfire in the garden, unless it’s next door.’They rang the bell but nobody came for some time.Then Mrs.Skinner opened the door.She looked even more worried than usual and the large flower ear-rings she wore contrasted incongruously with her pinched anxious little face.‘Oh, Miss Lydgate,’ she cried, ‘Mr.Lydgate is in the garden, and Miss Oliphant is there.’‘Miss Oliphant? Who is Miss Oliphant?’‘We met her that Sunday afternoon,’ Miss Clovis began to explain, but Miss Lydgate was already striding through the hall and out of the back door.‘Alaric!’she called.‘What are you doing?’There was no answer so they ventured further into the garden, then stopped in the middle of the lawn to gasp at the sight that met their eyes.A large bonfire of sticks and garden rubbish was blazing beyond the vegetable patch.Two figures, a tall man and a small woman, were poking at it vigorously with long sticks, pausing from time to time to throw on to it bundles of paper which they were taking from a tin trunk which stood on the ground nearby.‘Alaric, what are you doing?’ Miss Lydgate’s voice had now risen to a screech.‘Why, hullo, Gertrude,’ he said, ‘we’re having a bonfire.’‘Yes,’ said Catherine, her face shining in the firelight, ‘Alaric had so much junk up in his attic and Guy Fawkes night seemed just the time to get rid of some of it.’She is calling him Alaric, thought Gertrude irrelevantly.‘But these are your notes,’ screamed Miss Clovis, snatching a half-burned sheet from the edge of the fire.‘“They did not know when their ancestors left the place of the big rock nor why, nor could they say how long they had been in their present habitat …”’ she read, then threw it back with an impatient gesture.‘Kinship tables!’ she shrieked.‘You cannot let these go!’ She snatched at another sheet, covered with little circles and triangles, but Alaric restrained her and poked it further into the fire with his stick.‘Esther, it’s no good,’ he said.‘I shall never write it up now.If Catherine hadn’t encouraged me, I don’t think it would ever have occurred to me that I could be free of this burden for ever.’‘Miss Oliphant, you are a wicked woman!’ cried Miss Clovis, making as if to strike her.‘The bonfire was my idea,’ said Alaric, ‘and now we are all going to have some mulled wine.’‘What, even Mrs.Skinner?’ asked Miss Lydgate, again with seeming irrelevance, but the idea of drinking with Mrs.Skinner was certainly a startling one.‘Yes, she will be joining us.’ He threw another bundle from the trunk on to the fire.Some of it, eaten by white ants, fell away like a shower of confetti.‘Oh, pretty!’ Catherine cried.‘But what will you do now?’ demanded Miss Lydgate.‘I don’t really know.I shall be free to do whatever I want to.I shall still review books, of course, but I could even write a novel, I suppose.’There was a shocked silence.‘He has the most wonderful material,’ Catherine said.Mrs.Skinner appeared on the lawn.‘The wine is ready,’ she announced uneasily.‘Then let’s go in and drink it,’ said Alaric.‘We can come out again afterwards to see how the bonfire is getting on.’It was ‘afterwards’ that Rhoda, stationed at her uncurtained window in the darkness, saw them, dancing, or so she thought, round the fire.She imagined, though she could not really see clearly enough to be certain, that some were wearing masks.One figure, a small person, it might have been Catherine or even Mrs.Skinner, appeared to be wrapped in some kind of native cloth or blanket.Rhoda had been out to supper at the vicarage earlier in the evening, so had not seen the beginning of the bonfire, only this strange ‘ orgy’, for really it did seem to be almost that.‘Didn’t you see them earlier?’ she asked her sister accusingly
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