as by a quite exceptional inspiration that she thought
after all it was wiser not to say that but to state that she had
finished the curtains and done everything (underlined) that Lady Harman
had desired. Sir Isaac read it and tossed it over to his wife. "Make her
send her bill," he remarked.

Whereupon Lady Harman set Mrs. Crumble in motion to bring Susan down to
Black Strand. This wasn't quite easy because as Mrs. Crumble pointed out
they hadn't the slightest use for Susan's curtains there, and Lady
Harman had to find the morning light quite intolerable in her
bedroom--she always slept with window wide open and curtains drawn
back--to create a suitable demand for Susan's services. But at last
Susan came, too humbly invisible for Sir Isaac's attention, and directly
she found Lady Harman alone in the room with her, she produced a pawn
ticket and twenty pounds. "I 'ad to give all sorts of particulars," she
said. "It was a job. But I did it...."

The day was big with opportunity, for Sir Isaac had been unable to
conceal the fact that he had to spend the morning in London. He had gone
up in the big car and his wife was alone, and so, with Susan upstairs
still deftly measuring for totally unnecessary hangings, Lady Harman was
able to add a fur stole and a muff and some gloves to her tweed
gardening costume, walk unchallenged into the garden and from the garden
into the wood and up the hillside and over the crest and down to the
high-road and past that great advertisement of Staminal Bread and so for
four palpitating miles, to the railway station and the outer world.

She had the good fortune to find a train imminent,--the
twelve-seventeen. She took a first-class ticket for London and got into
a compartment with another woman because she felt it would be safer.

Sec.10

Lady Harman reached Miss Alimony's flat at half-past three in the
afternoon. She had lunched rather belatedly and uncomfortably in the
Waterloo Refreshment Room and she had found out that Miss Alimony was at
home through the telephone. "I want to see you urgently," she said, and
Miss Alimony received her in that spirit. She was hatless but she had a
great cloud of dark fuzzy hair above the grey profundity of her eyes and
she wore an artistic tea-gown that in spite of a certain looseness at
neck and sleeve emphasized the fine lines of her admirable figure. Her
flat was furnished chiefly with books and rich oriental hangings and
vast cushions and great b