quieter. But she only pressed her face further into his shoulder, in pain, like a child that cannot tell.

‘What is it, then?’ he asked. Suddenly she broke away, wiped her eyes, regained her composure, and went and sat in a chair.

‘Father hit me,’ she announced, sitting bunched up, rather like a ruffled bird, her eyes very bright.

‘What for?’ he said.

She looked away, and would not answer. There was a pitiful redness about her sensitive nostrils, and her quivering lips.

‘Why?’ he repeated, in his strange, soft, penetrating voice.

She looked round at him, rather defiantly.