u will know that is a lie, you clever Miss Mapp, and so you will go to
tea with him to-morrow and find me there. _Bene!_ Now where is his
house?"

This was a sort of scheming that had never entered into Miss Mapp's
life, and she saw with pain how shallow she had been all these years.
Often and often she had, when inquisitive questions were put her,
answered them without any strict subservience to truth, but never had
she thought of confusing the issues like this. If she told Diva a lie,
Diva probably guessed it was a lie, and acted accordingly, but she had
never thought of making it practically impossible to tell whether it was
a lie or not. She had no more idea when she walked back along the High
Street with the Contessa swinging her basket by her side, whether that
lady was going to tea with Major Benjy to-day or to-morrow or when, than
she knew whether the crab was going to eat the beefsteak.

"There's his house," she said, as they paused at the dentist's corner,
"and there's mine next it, with the little bow-window of my garden-room
looking out on to the street. I hope to welcome you there, dear
Contessa, for a tiny game of bridge and some tea one of these days very
soon. What day do you think? To-morrow?"

(Then she would know if the Contessa was going to tea with Major Benjy
to-morrow ... unfortunately the Contessa appeared to know that she would
know it, too.)

"My flirt!" she said. "Perhaps I may be having tea with my flirt
to-morrow."

Better anything than that.

"I will ask him, too, to meet you," said Miss Mapp, feeling in some
awful and helpless way that she was playing her adversary's game.
"Adversary?" did she say to herself? She did. The inscrutable Contessa
was "up to" that too.

"I will not amalgamate my treats," she said. "So that is his house! What
a charming house! How my heart flutters as I ring the bell!"

Miss Mapp was now quite distraught. There was the possibility that the
Contessa might tell Major Benjy that it was time he married, but on the
other hand she was making arrangements to go to tea with him on an
unknown date, and the hero of amorous adventures in India and elsewhere
might lose his heart again to somebody quite different from one whom he
could hope to marry. By daylight the dear Contessa was undeniably plain:
that was something, but in these short days, tea would be conducted by
artificial light, and by artificial light she was not so like a rabbit.
What was worse was that