Miss Ingate’s mouth stood open, and her eyes seemed startled.

“But you can’t go to London alone.  You wouldn’t know what to do.”

“Yes, I should.  I’ve arranged everything.  I shall wear my best clothes.  When I arrive at Liverpool Street I shall take a taxi.  I’ve got three addresses of boarding-houses out of the Daily Telegraph, and they’re all in Bloomsbury, W.C.  I shall have lessons in shorthand and typewriting at Pitman’s School, and then I shall get a situation.  My name will be Vavasour.”

“But you’ll be caught.”

“I shan’t.  I shall book to Ipswich first and begin again from there.  Girls like me aren’t so easy to catch as all that.”

“You’re vehy cunning.”

“I get that from mother.  She’s most frightfully cunning with father.”

“Audrey,” said Miss Ingate with a strange grin, “I don’t know how I can sit here and listen to you.  You’ll ruin me with your father, because if you go I’m sure I shall never be able to keep from him that I knew all about it.”

“Then you shouldn’t have sworn,” retorted Audrey.  “But I’m glad you did swear, because I had to tell somebody, and there was nobody but you.”

Miss Ingate might possibly have contrived to employ some of that sagacity in which she took a secret pride upon a very critical and urgent situation, had not Mrs. Moze, with a white handkerchief wrapped round her forehead, at that moment come into the room.  Immediately the study was full of neuralgia and eau-de-Cologne.

When Mrs. Moze and Miss Ingate at length recovered from the tenderness of meeting each other after a separation of ten days or more, Audrey had vanished like an illusion.  She was not afraid of her mother; and she could trust Miss Ingate, though Miss Ingate and Mrs. Moze were dangerously intimate; but she was too self-conscious to remain in the presence of her fellow-creatures; and in spite of her faith in Miss Ingate she thought of the spinster as of a vase filled now with a fatal liquor which by any accident might spill and spread ruin—­so that she could scarcely bear to look upon Miss Ingate.

At the back of the house a young Pomeranian dog, which had recently solaced Miss Ingate in the loss of a Pekingese done to death by a spinster’s too-nourishing love, was prancing on his four springs round the chained yard-dog, his friend and patron.  In a series of marvellous short bounds, he followed Audrey with yapping eagerness down the slope of the garden; and the yard-dog, aware that none but the omnipotent deity, Mr. Moze, sole source of good and evil, had the right to loose him, turned round once and laid himself flat and long on the ground, sighing.

The garden, after developing into an orchard and deteriorating into a scraggy plantation, ended in a low wall that was at about the level of the sea-wall and separated from it by a water-course and a strip of very green meadow.  Audrey glanced instinctively back at the house to see if anybody was watching her.