Miss Brodie sat shrivelled and betrayed in her long-preserved dark musquash coat. She had been retired before her time. She said, ‘I am past my prime.’

‘It was a good prime,’ said Sandy.

They looked out of the wide windows at the little Braid Burn trickling through the fields and at the hills beyond, so austere from everlasting that they had never been capable of losing anything by the war.

‘Teddy Lloyd was greatly in love with me, as you know,’ said Miss Brodie, ‘and I with him. It was a great love. One day in the art room he kissed me. We never became lovers, not even after you left Edinburgh, when the temptation was strongest.’

Sandy stared through her little eyes at the hills.

‘But I renounced him,’ said Miss Brodie. ‘He was a married man. I renounced the great love of my prime. We had everything in common, the artistic nature.’

She had reckoned on her prime lasting till she was sixty. But this, the year after the war, was in fact Miss Brodie’s last and fifty-sixth year. She looked older than that, she was suffering from an internal growth. This was her last year in the world and in another sense it was Sandy’s.