The meeting has been moved forward an hour. It was at 3 o'clock; now it's at 2 o'clock.

Devices now track and record our every move and, whether we like it or not, each one of us will bequeath to posterity a virtual avatar, a digital being whose calls, messages, transactions, loves and losses will live on in a vast, unregulated cyberspace. The afterlife has arrived, at least for our cyberbeings.

Signior Riccabocca had become very intimate, as we have seen, at the Parsonage. But not so at the Hall. For though the Squire was inclined to be very friendly to all his neighbours he was, like most country gentlemen, rather easily huffed.

It is a reflection on his character that he never came back to see them.