o pieces. Oh yes! All to pieces. I spoke
to the police. I said, 'Aren't you going to protect these ladies'
property?' But they didn't lift a finger."

"And weren't you arrested?"

"Me!" shrieked Miss Ingate. "Me arrested!" Then more quietly, in an assured
tone, "Oh no! I wasn't arrested. You see, as soon as the row began I just
walked away from the organ and became one of the crowd. I'm all _for_ them,
but I wasn't going to be arrested."

Miss Ingate's sparkling eyes seemed to say: "Sylvia Pankhurst can be
arrested if she likes, and so can Mrs. Despard and Annie Kenney and Jane
Foley, or any of them. But the policeman that is clever enough to catch
Miss Ingate of Moze does not exist. And the gumption of Miss Ingate of Moze
surpasses the united gumption of all the other feminists in England."

"Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!" repeated Miss Ingate with mingled complacency, glee,
passion, and sardonic tolerance of the whole panorama of worldly existence.
"The police were awful, shocking. But I was not arrested."

"Well, _I_ was--this morning," said Audrey in a low and poignant voice.

Miss Ingate was startled out of her mood of the detached ironic spectator.

"What?" she frowned.

They heard a servant moving about at the foot of the stairs, and a capped
head could be seen through the interstices of the white Chinese balustrade.
The study was the only immediate refuge; Miss Ingate advanced right into
it, and Audrey pushed the door to.

"Father's given me a month's C.B."

Miss Ingate, gazing at the girl's face, saw in its quiet and yet savage
desperation the possibility that after all she might indeed be surprised by
the vagaries of human nature in the village. And her glance became
sympathetic, even tender, as well as apprehensive.

"'C.B.'? What do you mean--'C.B.'?"

"Don't you know what C.B. means?" exclaimed Audrey with scornful
superiority over the old spinster. "Confined to barracks. Father says I'm
not to go beyond the grounds for a month. And to-day's the second of
April!"

"No!"

"Yes, he does. He's given me a week, you know, before. Now it's a month."

Silence fell.

Miss Ingate looked round at the shabby study, with its guns, cigar-boxes,
prints, books neither old nor new, japanned boxes of documents, and general
litter scattered over the voluted walnut furniture. Her own house was
old-fashioned, and she realised it was old-fashioned; but when she came
into Flank Hall, and particularly into Mr. Moze's st