“Good morning.”

The man’s accent struck her.  She said to herself, with amusement: 

“He’s Irish!”

Audrey had left the astonished but dispassionate gardener at the hedge, and was now emerging from the scanty and dishevelled plantation close to the boundary wall of the estate.  She supposed that the police must have been on her track and on the track of Jane Foley, and that by some mysterious skill they had hunted her down.  But she did not care.  She was not in the least afraid.  The sudden vision of a jail did not affright her.  On the contrary her chief sensation was one of joyous self-confidence, which sensation had been produced in her by the remarks and the attitude of Musa.  She had always known that she was both shy and adventurous, and that the two qualities were mutually contradictory; but now it appeared to her that diffidence had been destroyed, and that that change which she had ever longed for in her constitution had at least really come to pass.

“You don’t seem very surprised to see me,” said Audrey.

“Well, madam,” said the detective, “I’m not paid to be surprised—­in my business.”

He had raised his hat.  He was standing on the dyke, and from that height he looked somewhat down upon Audrey leaning against the wall.  The watercourse and the strip of eternally emerald-green grass separated them.  Though neither tall nor particularly handsome, he was a personable man, with a ready smile and alert, agile movements.  Audrey was too far off to judge of his eyes, but she was quite sure that they twinkled.  The contrast between this smart, cheerful fellow and the half-drowned victim in the area of the house in Paget Gardens was quite acute.

“Now I’ve a good mind to hold a meeting for your benefit,” said Audrey, striving to recall the proper phrases of propaganda which she had heard in the proper quarters in London during her brief connection with the cause.  However, she could not recall them, “But there’s no need to,” she added.  “A gentleman of your intelligence must be of our way of thinking.”

“About what?”

“About the vote, of course.  And so your conduct is all the more shocking.”

“Why!” he exclaimed, laughing.  “If it comes to that, your own sex is against you.”

Audrey had heard this argument before, and it had the same effect on her as on most other stalwarts of the new political creed.  It annoyed her, because there was something in it.

“The vast majority of women are with us,” said she.

“My wife isn’t.”

“But your wife isn’t the vast majority of women,” Audrey protested.

“Oh yes, she is,” said the detective, “so far as I’m concerned.  Every wife is, so far as her husband is concerned.  Sure, you ought to know that!” In his Irish way he doubled the “r” of the word “sure,” and somehow this trick made Audrey like him still more.  “My wife believes,” he concluded, “that woman’s sphere is the home.”