ousand, Leonie, _sensibly_." Susan Hetth's
voice was dull, choked doubtlessly by the dust of her castle ruins.

"I've got to go to India!"

"Why, for goodness sake?"

"I don't know, Auntie, I've simply got to go!"

"How silly," said Auntie, as she forced a cigarette inartistically into
a holder, adding abruptly, as her commonplace mind jumped at a
commonplace loop-hole, "Where is Jan Cuxson? I should think----"

Leonie answered quickly, breaking her aunt's words.

"I have no idea! I haven't heard from him since he left England."

"Huh!" said Susan Hetth, putting up an absolute smoke screen, "and what
will you do after the money is spent, pray?"

Leonie stared wide-eyed into the tobacco haze. "That," she said
slowly, "is on the knees of the gods!"

Talking being temporarily suspended by the band in the death throes of
the overture to Zampa, the two women sat silent; one frantically trying
to solve financial problems, the other with her head a little on one
side as though trying to catch the thread of some conversation.

A strange thing happened as the band stopped.

Leonie rose quite suddenly, with a half-eaten cake half-way to her
mouth.

"I must go!" she said quite flatly, placing the cake on a plate and
looking at her aunt without seeing her.

"_Go_!" shrilled Susan Hetth, putting her fourth cup of tea down with
an irritated slam. "Where on earth _to_?"

But Leonie turned and walked away with never a word of explanation, and
her aunt, with the thrifty side of her plebeian soul uppermost, turned
to the task of getting through as much as possible of what was left of
the two teas for which two shillings had been paid.

The porter looked hard at Leonie when she asked for a taxi, hesitated
for a moment, looked hard again, and refrained from putting the
question hovering on his tongue.

"Seemed quite dazed like," he explained later to his wife in Camberwell
as she juggled with sausages, "pale as death, with a kind of funny look
round her eyes!"

"To the British Museum," Leonie said through the window as the taxi
door closed, and the funny look round her eyes deepened into a line of
perplexity between the eyebrows, as the cab bore her swiftly to her
destination and her destiny.

She walked swiftly up the steps to the institution she was visiting for
the first time, and through the glass swing doors, just as though she
was hurrying to an appointment; she turned, without hesitating, sharply
to the l