else was the Padre, but while he was with the duellists, it was
as impossible to ask him what had happened as to ask the duellists who
had won. She must, while Miss Mapp rested, get hold of the Padre without
the duellists.

Even as Athene sprang full grown and panoplied from the brain of Zeus,
so from Diva's brain there sprang her plan complete. She even resisted
the temptation to go on admiring autumn tints, in order to see how the
interesting trio "looked" when, as they must presently do, they passed
close to where she stood, and hurried home, pausing only to purchase,
pay for, and carry away with her from the provision shop a large and
expensively-dressed crab, a dainty of which the Padre was inordinately
fond. Ruinous as this was, there was a note of triumph in her voice
when, on arrival, she called loudly for Janet, and told her to lay
another place at the luncheon table. Then putting a strong constraint on
herself, she waited three minutes by her watch, in order to give the
Padre time to get home, and then rang him up and reminded him that he
had promised to lunch with her that day. It was no use asking him to
lunch in such a way that he might refuse: she employed without remorse
this pitiless _force majeure_.

The engagement was short and brisk. He pleaded that not even now could
he remember even having been asked (which was not surprising), and said
that he and wee wifie had begun lunch. On which Diva unmasked her last
gun, and told him that she had ordered a crab on purpose. That silenced
further argument, and he said that he and wee wifie would be round in a
jiffy, and rang off. She did not particularly want wee wifie, but there
was enough crab.

Diva felt that she had never laid out four shillings to better purpose,
when, a quarter of an hour later, the Padre gave her the full account of
his fruitless search among the sand-dunes, so deeply impressive was his
sense of being buoyed up to that incredibly fatiguing and perilous
excursion by some Power outside himself. It never even occurred to her
to think that it was an elaborate practical joke on the part of the
Power outside himself, to spur him on to such immense exertions to no
purpose at all. He had only got as far as this over his interrupted
lunch with wee wifie, and though she, too, was in agonized suspense as
to what happened next, she bore the repetition with great equanimity,
only making small mouse-like noises of impatience which nobody heard. He