What is the secret surrounding the birth of Imelda's child? This dark novella presents us with two contradictory accounts of events which lead to madness and death for the scions of a genteel Border family. The reader is invited to decide which testimony, if either, is to be relied upon. The short stories show superably the familiar Herdman preoccupations: reckless and unreliable narrators, states of mind bordering on the insane, and partially submerged complexes which erupt into the normal circumstances of life with surreal and unforgettable results.