“I shall come with you,” said Audrey, caressing the recreant who, while equal to trifles such as policemen, magistrates, and prisons, was miserably afraid of a strange home.  In fact Audrey now liked Jane much more than ever, liked her completely—­and perhaps admired her rather less, though her admiration was still intense.  And the thought in Audrey’s mind was:  “Never will I desert this girl!  I’m a militant, too, now, and I shall stick by her.”  And she was full of a happiness which she could not understand and which she did not want to understand.

The next morning all the newspaper posters in Northhampton bore the words:  “Policemen and suffragettes on Joy Wheel,” or some variation of these words.  And they bore nothing else.  And in all the towns and many of the villages through which they passed on the way to Colchester, the same legend greeted their flying eyes.  Audrey and Miss Ingate, in the motor-car, read with great care all the papers.  Audrey blushed at the descriptions of herself, which were flattering.  It seemed that the Cabinet Minister’s political meeting had been seriously damaged by the episode, for the reason that rumours of the performance on the Joy Wheel had impaired the spell of eloquence and partially emptied the hall.  And this was the more disappointing in that the police had been sure that nothing untoward would occur.  It seemed also that the police were on the track of the criminals.

“Are they!” exclaimed Jane Foley with a beautiful smile.

Then the car approached a city of towers on a hill, and as it passed by the station, which was in the valley, Miss Ingate demanded a halt.  She got out in the station yard and transferred her belongings to a cab.

“I shall drive home from here,” she said.  “I’ve often done it before.  After all, I did play the barrel organ all the way down Regent Street.  Surely I can rest on the barrel organ, can’t I, Miss Foley—­at my age? ...  What a business I shall have when I do get home, and nobody expecting me!”

And when certain minor arrangements had been made, the car mounted the hill into Colchester and took the Frinton road, leaving Miss Ingate’s fly far behind.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE SPATTS

The house of the Spatts was large, imposing and variegated.  It had turrets, balconies, and architectural nooks in such quantity that the unaided individual eye could not embrace it all at once.  It overlooked, from a height, the grounds of the Frinton Sports Club, and a new member of this club, upon first beholding the residence, had made the immortal remark:  “It wants at least fourteen people to look at it.”  The house stood in the middle of an unfinished garden, which promised ultimately to be as heterogeneous as itself, but which at present was merely an expanse of sorely wounded earth.