twice her age or
more, that Audrey had first divined her new importance in the world. Their
deference indicated that in their opinion the future mistress of Flank Hall
was not Mrs. Moze, but Audrey. Audrey admitted that they were right. Yet
she took no pleasure in issuing commands. She spoke firmly, but she said to
herself: "There is no backbone to this firmness, and I am a fraud." She had
always yearned for responsibility, yet now that it was in her hand she
trembled, and she would have dropped it and run away from it as from a
bomb, had she not been too cowardly to show her cowardice.

The instance of Aguilar, the head-gardener and mechanic, well illustrated
her pusillanimity. She loathed Aguilar; her mother loathed him; the
servants loathed him. He had said at the inquest that the car was in
perfect order, but that Mr. Moze was too excitable to be a good driver.
His evidence was true, but the jury did not care for his manner. Nor did
the village. He had only two good qualities--honesty and efficiency; and
these by their rarity excited jealousy rather than admiration. Audrey
strongly desired to throw the gardener-mechanic upon the world; it
nauseated her to see his disobliging face about the garden. But he remained
scathless, to refuse demanded vegetables, to annoy the kitchen, to
pronounce the motor-car utterly valueless, and to complain of his own
liver. Audrey had legs; she had a tongue; she could articulate. Neither
wish nor power was lacking in her to give Aguilar the supreme experience of
his career. And yet she did not walk up to him and say: "Aguilar, please
take a week's notice." Why? The question puzzled her and lowered her
opinion of herself.

She was similarly absurd in the paramount matter of the safe. The safe
could not be opened. The village, having been thrilled by four stirring
days of the most precious and rare fever, had suffered much after the
funeral from a severe reaction of dullness. It would have suffered much
more had the fact not escaped that the safe could not be opened. In the
deep depression of the day following the funeral the village could still
say to itself: "Romance and excitement are not yet over, for the key of the
Moze safe is lost, and the will is in the safe!"

The village did not know that there were two keys to the safe and that they
were both lost. Nobody knew that except Audrey and Miss Ingate and Mr.
Cowl. The official key was lost because Mr. Moze's key-ring was lost. The