Mud sucked against Mother’s legs as she laboured up the bank, the children in the basket craning their necks to watch the commotion on the eastern bank, Oomy bleating, struggling not to get left behind. Mother waited patiently for her baby, to make sure she, too, made it to solid ground. Once there, ignorant of war, they started on a pre-luncheon snack of elephant grass. The river was so massively wide the threat from the Japanese seemed distant. Although chided by Po Net, mother and baby plodded slowly from the riverbank, stopping at a fresh clump of elephant grass and settled in for a late breakfast.

Thump, thump! Air pressure pummelled eardrums; overhead, a branch of a tree, sliced clean through, fell to the ground, silver-green light shivering off the tumbling leaves.  Another great clap of air-pressure, ending in a soft pock! as something squelched into the mud, thirty feet from Mother. Another pock!, further off, sending up a riot of waterfowl.

‘Mortars,’ shouted Sam. ‘Move!’

Mother’s enormous ears cocked out, beating the air, her feet barely touching the ground, Po Net turning around, motioning to the children to get down, to flatten their bodies as much as they could and hold on, tight. They bounced about in the basket as Mother’s legs scissored to and fro, a giant steeplechaser gaining speed before it took a monster fence, hands covering faces, stray lianas and elephant grass whipping at their arched backs with wicked force. Deep in thick forest, uphill and half a mile or more from the bank, Mother slowed to a trot.

‘She was flying,’ said Molly.

Grace ruffled Molly’s hair. ‘You know, it sounds mad, Molly, but you’re right. When people say that elephants can’t fly, they don’t know what they are talking about. But we know. It’s our secret. Elephants can fly.’

Mother turned around 360 degrees and raised her trunk like a periscope, sniffing the air. The hiss and clatter of the jungle’s sounds gave way to the mother elephant breathing out a long, querulous sob.

‘What’s the matter with her?’ asked Molly.

‘Sssh,’ said Emily.

Oomy was nowhere to be seen.

‘It’s the baby, Molly, he’s got lost,’ whispered Grace.

Another sob from Mother, a low, deep-throated sound full of melancholy and ache. The mother elephant was facing back towards the river, her ears wide out, cocked to hear the slightest sound.

The children, Grace and Po Net remained chapel-quiet, trying to pick out the baby elephant’s answering cry above the general hubbub of the jungle.

A disturbance in the greenery to the left, the tops of the elephant grass waving this way and that. Hidden by the body of the grass, something was moving slowly, delicately, towards them. Molly yelped out, ‘He’s coming!’

‘Sssh,’ whispered Grace.

They tracked the swaying of the grass from their vantage point on the elephant’s back. Soon Oomy would emerge from cover. Not a squeak from the children. The grass at the edge of the clearing rippled and a small brown deer peeked out at them, twitched its ears, scarpered across the open ground and vanished into the jungle.

The mother elephant lifted her trunk and gave out another sobbing trump. No reply. No sign of Oomy.

Without hurry but with determination Mother began to plod back down the path she’d just made through the elephant grass, back towards the Chindwin, towards the Japanese. Po Net turned his head to the basket and shook his head, grim-faced. He said nothing, but Grace understood the look to mean that if a mother elephant has lost her calf, there is no power on earth that can stop her from trying to track him down.

Again the mother elephant sobbed, a long quivering note, as if from a cello, of unbearable sadness. Suddenly, a high-pitched ‘toot-toot’, like the horn on a toy car, sounded nearby and Oomy crashed through the undergrowth and ran straight to Mother.

‘Aah,’ said Joseph. ‘Baby come back.’

The calf was rewarded with a great thwack of mother’s trunk on his backside. The trouble-maker trotted away a slight distance, a few steps, not far, coiled his trunk into his mouth and began sucking it, an action exactly like a small boy, having been scolded, sucking his thumb. Mother’s trunk sidled over to him and trunk entwined with trunk, they nuzzled together. Mother throbbed with a new sound, a gargling burble of pleasure.

‘She’s purring, Miss,’ said Emily.

‘Yes, Em, I do believe you’re right,’ replied Grace.

Po Net turned round and gave one of his shy grins, as if he had understood every word.

With a few orders from Po Net, mother and calf found the rest of the party through call and counter-call, coming to rest in a cave of foliage roofed by a jungle canopy so high it hurt their necks to look up at it. Grace marvelled at the intelligence of the elephants. They’d picked this spot, the perfect place to take stock, hide from any Japanese planes, before moving on.

Rungdot, the monster, trumpeted his might and a few wild elephants, miles away, answered back, the sound re-echoing around the bowl of hills. As the elephants chomped peacefully at the grass underfoot, the mortar fire from the Japanese seemed a bizarre memory.

Po Net dug his heels into the elephant’s hide and Mother buckled her hind-legs, jerking the pannier down earthwards. They scrambled out, Joseph, assisted by Grace, taking a little longer.

‘All well?’ asked Sam. His stern growl seemed a little softer, as if Bishop Strachan’s School had passed some kind of Elephant Man test.

‘Yes, no injuries,’ said Grace. ‘But when the baby got lost, Mother’s distress… They’re just like us,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Sam. ‘They’re better. They don’t make war,’ and he made his strange, muted elephant trump noise. ‘There are no refugees here, so you’ll walk along with us till nightfall.’  He headed off into the bush, but just before he did, he turned back. ‘By the way, no more bloody Lady of Shalott.’

Emily blushed.

‘No wonder the Japs found us.’

‘But you and the Havildar had your noisy row by the riverbank,’ replied Grace. ‘That was much louder. Besides, Tennyson was Poet Laureate.’ Cheekily, she over-emphasised the last two words, as if Sam was a little on the slow side.

He made his funny noise again, half-raspberry, half-bull-elephant snort. Had he spent so long in the jungle he spoke better Elephantese than English?

‘The Japs have got their own elephants so best not hang about. The fit children, I’m afraid to say, you’re walking.’

Sam’s way of talking to the children was alarmingly frank but, nevertheless, it seemed to work. Not everyone could walk all day, of course: Joseph was judged too ill, and Michael too little, although that decision was partly to keep Joseph company. Another of the girls, suffering from a poor tummy, joined them on the back of Mother, the ‘hospital elephant’. As the Havildar lofted Michael up into the sky, his school cap, which he had insisted on wearing all the way from Rangoon, a talisman, fell to the ground, whereupon Mother scooped it up with her trunk and popped it into her mouth.

‘The elephant’s eating my cap,’ cried Michael.

Po Net gabbled something in Burmese to Sam, who roared with laughter, telling a distraught Michael: ‘Don’t worry, old chap. Po Net will look out for you and in a few days’ time you’ll get your cap back.’

‘But it will be covered in elephant pooh!’ squeaked Michael, his eyes beginning to fill.

‘Now listen here, old chap,’ said Sam, resting on his haunches to look Michael in the eye. ‘If having your cap gobbled up by a lady elephant is the worst thing that happens to you this year, then lucky you!’

The Havildar, glowering the whole time, produced a packet of biscuits from his knapsack and with his maimed hands passed them round the children. As they watched him walk on, Grace felt Molly pulling at the sleeve of her frock.

‘Miss, what happened to his fingers?’

‘Sssh, Molly, that’s a rude question.’ But the schoolteacher was dying to know the answer herself.

The old school crocodile formed up as it had done countless times before. They followed the curiously narrow trail of flattened jungle made by the elephants ahead. Within seconds, the elephants began to vanish. High up in the trees a monkey screeched, insects hissed and whispered to each other, but ahead she could make out nothing but a curtain of green. The ease with which the elephants disappeared into the jungle gave her comfort that it might just be possible for them to play hide and seek with the Japanese.

Sam marched ahead with his spaniel to pick the spot for camp that night. On they trudged, unfit by the lack of exercise after being cooped up in the bus. The rain held off and the path was not atrociously steep or the track too difficult. Yet it was never easy. The heat, suffocating and damp, sapped Grace’s strength as she stumbled through the green tunnel, the occasional pat of elephant dung the only clue to the creatures that had gone ahead.

At midday, they stopped for lunch. ‘Usual muck for lunch, eh?’ said Ruby mutinously.

‘Hush, Ruby. Miss can’t help it. Don’t be so critical.’ It was Emily, coming to the defence of Grace, who mouthed a silent ‘thank you’.

But the elephant men did come up with lots of new things to eat: slices of mango, tiny wild bananas, more sour than sweet, and even a pudding of sorts, made of cold rice in bamboo leaf and one teaspoon of cocoa powder.

‘Yuck!’ cried Molly.

‘Sssh, it’s yummy,’ said Ruby, ‘like a chocolatey rice pudding. If you don’t want it, I’ll have your share.’ Molly fell silent and tucked in.

Grace tracked down the Havildar, deep in conversation with Po Toke.

‘Havildar, I have to say I am worried about our lunch. There’s almost too much to eat.’

‘Sam’s orders. The more we eat, the lighter the load for the elephants, the faster we can go. This applies to the first few days, while the Japanese are so closely behind. We eat now, starve later.’

‘Have they crossed the river?’

Smiling at Grace, Po Toke shook his head. ‘Not yet, Miss.’

After a short rest, the children were on their feet again. They made much poorer progress in the afternoon, struggling up a steep ravine, maybe 1,500 feet high, then over its spine and down the other side, crossing a chaung or stream at the bottom. Some chaungs were dry, but this one was a roaring torrent, bursting with snow-melt from the Himalayas. The elephant men loaded up the children and they were soon across. Instead of dismounting, the children stared at the oozies with imploring eyes. They rode on, exhilarated.

Ruby, fit and old enough to have to walk, started to hum a tune, hopelessly incongruous in the jungle, but soon the marching army of children and oozies were joining in the hum as her smoky voice rang out:

Grace could have sworn that the elephants were taking two step forwards, one step back, in tune.

 Before long the elephant grass swung back to reveal Sam, Winston at his heels, beside himself with fury.

‘Shut up!’ he barked. ‘Shut up! No bloody singing. Or we will all be doing the Lambeth Walk in a Japanese prison camp.’

‘Aaah,’ said Ruby playfully.

 ‘No, Miss, it isn’t funny. We’re on the run from the Imperial Japanese Army. If they catch us, they may kill some and put the rest of us in the bag. They plan to steal the elephants so that they can invade India. And you are doing your level best to make life easy for them. Do you understand?’

Ruby, one of nature’s troublemakers, looked down. It was perhaps the very first time that Grace had seen her in any way submissive.

Sam’s eyes drilled into Grace. ‘Miss Collins, I beg you to keep these children under control. If I hear another squeak from them, I will hold you personally responsible. Now stay quiet. The sooner we find the main track, the sooner we can say goodbye,’ he hissed, and disappeared back up the way he had come.

‘Miss, why is he so bad-tempered?’ asked Molly.

‘I don’t rightly know, Molly.’

‘Perhaps he prefers the cha-cha-cha,’ whispered Ruby, but not so quietly that Grace couldn’t hear every word.

‘Sssh,’ said Grace, ‘he’s got a lot on his plate. You’ve got to remember that sometimes people with a bad temper may be right, after all.’

‘Hmph.’ A perfect imitation of Sam’s signature elephantine grunt. Grace knew damn well it came from Ruby, she elected not to hear it.

‘What will happen when we join up with the rest of the refugees, Miss?’ asked Emily.

‘The colonel would prefer it if we carried on to India on our own.’

‘But we’d miss the elephants,’ said Emily.

The last leg of the march was a slip-sliding miserable business, over low, swampy ground, thick with mosquitoes. The walkers looked up with envy at the lucky ones riding on their elephants. At six o’clock, another furious chaung, 100 yards across, blocked their path, the snow-melt raging against the rocks. For the strongest adult, it would be a suicidal risk to swim across. The elephants stepped across, the older ladies making sure their little ones were tucked in by their sides, sheltered from the force of the current. Grace bit her lip. This journey, without the help of the elephant men, would be impossible.

On the far bank, the children dismounted from their elephants, exhausted. In the golden half-hour before sundown the yellow-green glare filtering through the jungle canopy changed to ochre and saffron. Down at the water’s edge Grace washed her hands, then lay full-length face down by the bank and plunged her head into the running water. It was bitingly cold but thrillingly refreshing. Her ears rang with the current, but she became aware of another sound – a weird bubbling. Lifting her dripping head out of the water, she saw an elephant’s trunk two feet away. Like a boy bubbling up a strawberry milkshake through his straw, Oomy was blowing air down his trunk into the water’s muddy bottom. A few feet away Mother looked on, making a wholly different sound, that low, gravelly gurgle of old-fashioned plumbing, the elephant purr of motherly love.

Elephants weren’t truly grey at all, Grace realised. It was mud and dust that turned them so. Washed clean in the stream Mother’s skin was far darker than her calf’s, almost blue-black for most of her body, but speckled black-on-pink like a trout behind her ears and across her trunk as it tapered into her head. Where her tummy met her legs the skin sagged in multiple folds, deeply corrugated and as comfortable as Grandad’s corduroy trousers. The mother’s eye, one only visible from side on, was tiny, set in the vast frame of her head, not pig-like because of the effect of a series of rings of skin rippling concentrically from it, as if the eye was a stone lobbed into a black pond. Whereas the eye remained locked on her calf, all but motionless, her trunk barely stayed still for a second, grubbing on the ground or raised up to sniff the wind. Entranced, Grace gazed on as Mother watched over her baby playing in the water.

 Oomy was absorbed in his game of blowing bubbles, black eyelashes as beautiful as a girl’s, shading a liquid brown eye. Mother tilted her head every now and then, this way and that, making sure that there was no threat to her son. A few yards further off upstream, two aunties were drinking the water, but also keeping the baby in full view. The two aunties formed two sides of a loose triangle, with Mother at the base, and the calf, playing in the water, in the middle: what looked a casual arrangement was in fact a fortress of flesh and trunk and bone, virtually impregnable. In the baby’s playfulness and the subtle watchfulness of mother and aunties, Grace found the elephants more like humans than she had ever thought possible.

Stopping his game, Oomy’s eye fixed on Grace. He gave her a wicked wink and showered her with a blast of mucky water.

‘He got you, Miss!’ shouted Molly.

‘Baby,’ said Joseph, pointing at Oomy. ‘Aaah.’

Grace gave him a squeeze. ‘Yes, Joseph, Oomy is Mother’s baby.’ The anti-malaria pills seemed to have done some good, to have slowed down his fever. He didn’t look at all well, but he managed a feeble smile. Looking at Oomy, his eyes sparkling with glee, he repeated: ‘Baby, aaah.’

Po Net used bark he had cut from a tree by the bank to create a kind of soap, and soon Mother’s back was lathered with a scummy blancmange. Fearlessly, he crouched underneath her belly and washed where the ropes attaching the basket had chafed against her. He ordered her to lift each foot, which he checked laboriously for thorns and wear and tear. One stamp from the elephant would crush the oozie stone dead, and the children marvelled at how much man and beast trusted each other. Inspecting Oomy’s feet was more problematic. He made such a fuss, squeaking and squirting Po Net whenever he got near the baby, that Mother had to give him a hefty thwack on his bottom before he settled down and let the oozie do his job.

Before dinner, Sam called a pow-wow of the adults. Recalling Sam’s irritation with the singing of the Lambeth Walk, Grace put on her apologetic face. Her reward was a brief nod, and a grunt, in elephantese.

Addressing the Havildar, Po Net and Grace, he said: ‘I’m still calculating that the main body of the Japs are intent on pressing north after our army. So long as we head due west, we’ll be well out of harm’s way. At least,’ Sam continued, ‘I think they won’t press hard in this direction. But it remains a gamble. And the bad news is that they’ve got elephants, ten of them by the looks of things, and almost certainly my bloody elephants. We had to leave four hundred behind, thanks to the incompetence of some useless types in the British Army. The Japs have obviously found ten.

 ‘No fires – and that means no hot meals, no boiling water, no tea tonight - because Japanese scouts will almost certainly have crossed the river on their elephant. They may confuse our party with a strong force of British soldiers, and that would not be good. Sentry pickets are to be placed on all four corners of the camp and five miles back down our track, less for fear of enemy attack than tigers, pythons and the like.’

Winston, Sam’s spaniel, licked the Havildar’s bare knee. He cursed the dog lavishly in Urdu and the animal yapped back at him and suddenly the two men were quarrelling, until Grace put a finger to her lips and cried: ‘Sssh! You’re setting a terrible example.’

A long, grisly silence, broken by a deep growly burbling. The Havildar was laughing. Everyone joined in, apart from Sam who glared at her. Grace had had enough of being demure and returned his gaze. After a beat, Sam studied his boots, the right-hand corner of his mouth wrinkling slightly.

The children were fed and watered, and the sick – Joseph and three girls with diarrhoea – were put up in the first aid tent. Word had got out that if you had the shakes you would get quinine and that meant chocolate to kill the taste, so Grace had to spend quite a bit of time suppressing a fake epidemic of malaria.

The fearsomeness of the Havildar helped. The children half-jumped every time he looked at them. At the end of the meal, Grace found she was standing next to him, as he gathered up the empty sardine tins.

‘I hope you don’t think I’m rude, Havdilar, but the children keep on asking: what happened to your hands?’

The Havildar stood up, towering over her, and smoothed his moustache down with the half-finger of his right hand. ‘Dinner was late one night.’ His voice was very deep. He paused. ‘I was hungry.’  Another pause, longer than before. ‘So, I ate my fingers,’ and, yelling at a Chin who had dared to start lighting a fire, he marched off.

The children were to sleep in the elephant baskets or placed two to a hammock, so that every one of them slept off the ground. No one was allowed a kerosene lamp in the open, but the stream, close by, gave off a faint phosphorescence which somehow grew more vivid the blacker the night became.

Sam had a moment to himself, reached into his pocket and produced a hip-flask, draining it deeply, and then he became aware of Grace standing close by.

‘My weakness, I’m afraid. Home-made firewater. My own recipe. Do you want a sip?’

‘Have you any to spare?’

‘Not much, but I’m going to run out in the next few days so one sip won’t make much of a difference. Go on. It will do you good. Sam’s Own Peculiar.’

It was quite the most vile drink she had ever drunk, a slurry of rancid coconut milk, swamp juice and cough mixture with, she was sure, more than a hint of elephant excrement.

‘Eeeyuckthankarrghyou,’ her eyes watering at the strength of it. ‘What’s it made of?’

‘Ah. That would be telling. After the war, I’m going to market it and become a rich man. Another?’

‘No. Good luck with that,’ she said so drily, and with such little sign of enthusiasm, that his right lip crinkled again.

‘When we join the rest of the refugees, what will you do Sam?’

 ‘The best track – correction, the only proper track – is due north. The problem is, it’s bunged up with what’s left of the army and thousands of refugees. Poor company for elephants and besides, the general staff have banned me from trying it, lest my elephants get in the way of their filing cabinets. So we’re going due west, finding our own path. It’s not easy without a proper map.’

‘Gosh, no.’

‘Hit the wrong ridge, and we add an extra week to the journey. And time is a luxury we don’t have.  Our destination is a tea estate the size of Yorkshire so we shouldn’t miss it.’

‘Do you know the people there?’

‘Hell, no. They’re in India, after all. I’m imagining a fine old bungalow, a vast, Victorian bath-tub, full of hot water, plenty of bars of soap with gleaming white towels and an unending line of gin and tonics – fine anti-malarial prophylactics. And in the morning bacon and eggs, white toast, Seville marmalade, nice chinwag with the planter, he’ll be very old, and he’ll have a charming young wife. And a fine bitch for Winston.’

The dog looked up, expectantly, and panted his approval.

‘Sorry, that came out a bit wrong. Not used to company. Not used to female company, excepting elephant cow.’

‘Excepting elephant cow,’ she agreed, laughing. He wasn’t sure but he suspected that because of the whiteness of her teeth in the gloom she was beaming at him.

‘On behalf of the children I would like to say thank you very, very much for rescuing us, Sam.’

‘Thank the elephants.’

‘I’m thanking you.’

‘I’m sorry I was pompous when we first met. How was Rangoon when you left it?’

‘Stinking. Chaos, naked lunatics running around, looters. The Indians afraid of revenge from the Burmese. Thousands running away, walking, dying by the road.’

‘We…’ he hesitated ‘…let our people down. Badly. Both the Burmese and the Indians. Too many whites have just buggered off or flown out of Burma without a bloody care in the world. But the lesson I’ve taken from that is that you must not promise protection if you can’t deliver it. Had I known that you’d spout bloody poetry in the middle of the Chindwin…’

‘You would have abandoned us?’

‘“Tirra-lirra said Sir Lancelot.” Bloody disgrace,’ and he gave his elephant snort.

‘But you didn’t abandon us. The children are loving it. They can’t wait for morning. Yesterday was the worst day of my life but today may have been, somehow, the best. I thought we’d never, ever make it across the river.’

Another snort.

Moonrise. Shafts of silvery light tunnelled through the forest canopy high above and splashed down onto the jungle floor.

A commotion and three Chin guards – the rearguard – came, carrying a fourth man hanging in a sling from a bamboo pole.

The Chin lowered their burden in a puddle of moonlight, resting the man’s bloodied head against a thick liana, his slumped form casting a shadow, eerie and forlorn.  The Chin explained in Burmese that they had found him by the Chindwin.

The faint light illuminated the man, unconscious, blood on his head, dried almost black against his blond hair.

 ‘That’s him,’ said Grace. The undergrowth murmured, twitching with a breath of air, the rhythm of the crickets rising and falling. ‘That’s the man who shot the Jemadar. That’s the murderer.’

The last word detonated like an assassin’s shot.

Sam motioned the Chin to carry the wounded man into his tent.

‘Murderer or not, let’s have a look at that head.’ Inside, she glimpsed a wide hammock, a canvas chair and a small table, on it an unlit kerosene lamp. The Chins sat the man, all but comatose, on the chair. Sam closed the tent flap after Grace, lit the kerosene lamp with a match and unlocked a small medical chest. He dabbed the head wound with alcohol spirit, wiping away the dried blood, and wrapped a clean white bandage around it, tying it off neatly.

By the lamplight she noticed something she hadn’t seen before in the gloom: a framed picture of a dark-haired woman in her thirties, laughing at someone else’s joke. In Burmese, Sam asked a Chin to find a hammock for the wounded man, telling him to get one of the sentries to check his breathing every hour and, if there was any change in his condition, to wake Sam up. They carried him away, gently, his head lolling onto the shoulder of the man supporting him.

‘Nasty cut – shrapnel, of some sort, bit of concussion, but the skull isn’t fractured. He’ll live. Pretty bloody amazing for him to swim the Chindwin after that bash to his head. Luck of the devil.’

Stone-faced under the moonlight, Grace said: ‘He’s a killer.’

Sam extinguished the kerosene lamp, leaving his face all but invisible in the gloom of the tent. He made no reply.

She repeated what she had just said.

‘He’s no threat. He can barely breathe.’

‘He shot the Jemadar in cold blood.’

‘I’m not a judge, still less a hanging one.’

The reluctance to take her side riled Grace. ‘I saw him shoot the Jemadar with my own eyes. I was but fifty feet away when it happened.’

 ‘If you really think the army will be over the moon about the idea of prosecuting a British sergeant in the middle of a war, one we appear to be losing extremely badly, by the way, after one Indian officer has been killed, probably by a stray bullet, then you have another think coming.’ Tiredness – no, worse than that, a grimy, exasperated fatigue – edged Sam’s voice as he went: ‘Are there any other witnesses? Oh, not the children. No court-martial will entertain a bunch of half-caste bastards.’

‘The children didn’t see anything. I was the only witness.’

‘Well, I fear they will look at you and dismiss you as just a girl who knows next to nothing about war or soldiery or what stray bullets can do. The very last thing they will want to do is rake up the mud between an Indian officer and a British soldier, what with all this talk of Jiffs and everything. That will be a disaster for them. So, if you insist on calling this chap a murderer, you’d better be right, but it’s going to be the word of a girl against a sergeant, one who has been injured in the line of duty. Nothing’s going to happen to him until, or rather if, we all reach India. And if you think that’s going to be easy, then, on that subject, too, you are horribly mistaken.’

‘Mr Metcalf,’ Grace started.

‘It’s either Sam or Colonel Metcalf, actually.’

‘Colonel, then. Murder is murder. That man killed our Jemadar in cold blood because he couldn’t abide waiting five minutes to help a busload of orphan not injured in the line of duty but in the act of making a very selfish escape from the enemy. He murdered an officer who was trying to maintain discipline and help us. What I think you are saying is that because the perpetrator is a white Englishman and the victim is of a coloured race, an Indian, no one will mind at all. I may be just a girl, in your view, in charge of sixty half-caste bastards, as you put it so disgracefully, but let me tell you this, Colonel, that to suggest he was killed by a stray bullet, sir, is a filthy lie. I saw what happened and I mind very much indeed, and when I am free of your travelling circus and get to civilisation, I shall say so, loud and clear. Good night to you, sir.’

‘Grace, I didn’t mean to…’

But she was gone.