and he leaves it with a lot of other keys loose in his
desk. I expect he thought nobody would ever dream of guessing it was a key
of the safe. I know he never looked at this roll, because I've been opening
the safe every day for weeks past, and the roll was always the same. In
fact, it was dusty. Then to-day I decided to take it, and here you are! He
finished himself off yesterday, so far as I'm concerned, with the business
about the punt."

"But do you know you're a thief, Audrey?" breathed Miss Ingate, extremely
embarrassed, and for once somewhat staggered by the vagaries of human
nature.

"You seem to forget, Miss Ingate," said Audrey solemnly, "that Cousin
Caroline left me a legacy of two hundred pounds last year, and that I've
never seen a penny of it. Father absolutely declined to let me have the
tiniest bit of it. Well, I've taken half. He can keep the other half for
his trouble."

Miss Ingate's mouth stood open, and her eyes seemed startled.

"But you can't go to London alone. You wouldn't know what to do."

"Yes, I should. I've arranged everything. I shall wear my best clothes.
When I arrive at Liverpool Street I shall take a taxi. I've got three
addresses of boarding-houses out of the _Daily Telegraph_, and they're all
in Bloomsbury, W.C. I shall have lessons in shorthand and typewriting at
Pitman's School, and then I shall get a situation. My name will be
Vavasour."

"But you'll be caught."

"I shan't. I shall book to Ipswich first and begin again from there. Girls
like me aren't so easy to catch as all that."

"You're vehy cunning."

"I get that from mother. She's most frightfully cunning with father."

"Audrey," said Miss Ingate with a strange grin, "I don't know how I can sit
here and listen to you. You'll ruin me with your father, because if you go
I'm sure I shall never be able to keep from him that I knew all about it."

"Then you shouldn't have sworn," retorted Audrey. "But I'm glad you did
swear, because I had to tell somebody, and there was nobody but you."

Miss Ingate might possibly have contrived to employ some of that sagacity
in which she took a secret pride upon a very critical and urgent situation,
had not Mrs. Moze, with a white handkerchief wrapped round her forehead,
at that moment come into the room. Immediately the study was full of
neuralgia and eau-de-Cologne.

When Mrs. Moze and Miss Ingate at length recovered from the tenderness of
meeting each other after a separation