Queen laughed lightly.

“Oh, G.J.!  How funny you are!  I’m really surprised you haven’t left London for good before now.  By rights you ought to belong to the Hook-it Brigade.  Do you know what they do?  They take a ticket to any station north or west, and when they get out of the train they run to the nearest house and interview the tenant.  Has he any accommodation to let?  Will he take them in as boarders?  Will he take them as paying guests?  Will he let the house furnished?  Will he let it unfurnished?  Will he allow them to camp out in the stables?  Will he sell the blooming house?  So there isn’t a house to be had on the North Western nearer than Leighton Buzzard.”

“Are you going?  Because I am,” said G.J.

Concepcion murmured: 

“Don’t go.”

“I shall go—­and so will you, both of you.”

“G.J.,” Queen mocked him, “you’re in a funk.”

“I’ve got courage enough to go, anyhow,” said he.  “And that’s more than you have.”

“You’re losing your temper.”

As a fact he was.  He grabbed at Queen, but she easily escaped him.  He saw the whiteness of her skirt in the distance of the roof, dimly rising.  She was climbing the ladder up the side of the chimney.  She stood on the top of the chimney, and laughed again.  A gun sounded.

G.J. said no more.  Using his flash-lamp he found his way to the ladder-shaft and descended.  He was in the warm and sheltered interior of the house; he was in another and a saner world.  Robin was at the foot of the ladder; she blinked under his lamp.

“I’ve had enough of that,” he said, and followed her to the illuminated boudoir, where after a certain hesitation she left him.  Alone in the boudoir he felt himself to be a very shamed and futile person, and he was still extremely angry.  The next moment Concepcion entered the boudoir.

“Ah!” he murmured, curiously appeased.

“You’re quite right,” said Concepcion simply.

He said: 

“Can you give me any reason, Con, why we should make a present of ourselves to the Hun?”

Concepcion repeated: 

“You’re quite right.”

“Is she coming?”

Concepcion made a negative sign.  “She doesn’t know what fear is, Queen doesn’t.”

“She doesn’t know what sense is.  She ought to be whipped, and if I got hold of her I’d whip her.”

“She’d like nothing better,” said Concepcion.

G.J. removed his overcoat and sat down.

Chapter 34

IN THE BOUDOIR

“We aren’t so desperately safe even here,” said G.J., firmly pursuing the moral triumph which Concepcion’s very surprising and comforting descent from the roof had given him.

“Don’t go to extremes,” she answered.

“No, I won’t.”  He thought of the valetry in the cellars, and the impossible humiliation of joining them; and added:  “I merely state.”  Then, after a moment of silence:  “By the way, was it only her idea that I should come along, or did the command come from both of you?” The suspicion of some dark, feminine conspiracy revisited him.