carried her pink face thrust forward, as
if leaning from a platform to address an audience. From this salience
her small chin retreated delicately into her pink throat.

"Is Miss Maud Blackadder here?" she said, marshalling her six.

The handsome girl detached herself slowly from Anthony's wall.

"What's the point," she said, "of keeping us hanging about like this--"

"Till _all_ our faces are known to the police--"

"There's a johnnie gone in there who can swear to _me_. Why didn't you
two turn up before?" said the handsome girl.

"Because," said Dorothea, "that johnnie was my father. He was pounding
on in front of us all up East Heath Road. If we'd got here sooner I
should have had to introduce you."

She looked at the six benevolently, indulgently. They might have been
children whose behaviour amused her. It was as if she had said, "I
avoided that introduction, not because it would have been dangerous and
indiscreet, but because it would have spoiled your fun for you."

She led the way into the garden and the house and through the hall into
the schoolroom. There they found eleven young girls who had come much
too soon, and mistaking the arrangements, had rung the bell and allowed
themselves to be shown in.

The schoolroom had been transformed into a sort of meeting hall. The big
oblong table had been drawn across one end of it. Behind it were chairs
for the speakers, before it were three rows of chairs where the eleven
young girls sat scattered, expectant.

The six stood in the free space in front of the table and looked at
Rosalind with significance.

"This," said Rosalind, "is our hostess, Miss Dorothea Harrison. Dorothy,
I think you've met Mrs. Eden, our Treasurer. This is our secretary, Miss
Valentina Gilchrist; Miss Ethel Farmer; Miss Winifred Burstall--"

Dorothy greeted in turn Mrs. Eden, a pretty, gentle woman with a face of
dreaming tragedy (it was she who had defended Rosalind outside the
gate); Miss Valentina Gilchrist, a middle-aged woman who displayed a
large grey pompadour above a rosy face with turned-back features which,
when she was not excited, had an incredulous quizzical expression (Miss
Gilchrist was the one who had said they had been led into a trap); Miss
Ethel Farmer, fair, attenuated, scholastic, wearing pince-nez with an
air of not seeing you; and Miss Winifred Burstall, weather-beaten, young
at fifty, wearing pince-nez with an air of seeing straight through you
to the other si