("His wife is stout,” Audrey decided within herself, on no grounds whatever.  “If she wasn’t, she couldn’t be a vast majority.”)

Aloud she said: 

“Well, then, why can’t you leave them alone in their sphere, instead of worrying them and spying on them down areas?”

“D’ye mean at Paget Gardens?”

“Of course.”

“Oh!” he laughed.  “That wasn’t professional—­if you’ll excuse me being so frank.  That was just due to human admiration.  It’s not illegal to admire a young woman, I suppose, even if she is a suffragette.”

“What young woman are you talking about?”

“Miss Susan Foley, of course.  I won’t tell you what I think of her, in spite of all she did, because I’ve learnt that it’s a mistake to praise one woman to another.  But I don’t mind admitting that her going off to the north has made me life a blank.  If I’d thought she’d go, I should never have reported the affair at the Yard.  But I was annoyed, and I’m rather hasty.”  He paused, and ended reflectively:  “I committed follies to get a word with the young lady, and I didn’t get it, but I’d do the same again.”

“And you a married man!” Audrey burst out, startled, and diverted, at the explanation, but at the same time outraged by a confession so cynical.

The detective pulled a silky moustache.

“When a wife is very strongly convinced that her sphere is the home,” he retorted slowly and seriously, “you’re tempted at times to let her have the sphere all to herself.  That’s the universal experience of married men, and ye may believe me, miss—­madam.”

Audrey said: 

“And now Miss Foley’s gone north, you’ve decided to come and admire me in my home!”

“So it is your home!” murmured the detective with an uncontrolled quickness which wakened Audrey’s old suspicions afresh—­and which created a new suspicion, the suspicion that the fellow was simply playing with her.  “I assure you I came here to recover; I’d heard it was the finest climate in England.”

“Recover?”

“Yes, from fire-extinguishers.  D’ye know I coughed for twenty-four hours after that reception?...  And you should have seen my clothes!  The doctor says my lungs may never get over it....  That’s what comes of admiration.”

“It’s what comes of behaving as no married man ought to behave.”

“Did I say I was married?” asked the detective with an ingenuous air.  “Well, I may be.  But I dare say I’m only married just about as much as you are yourself, madam.”

Upon this remark he raised his hat and departed along the grassy summit of the sea-wall.

Audrey flushed for the second time that morning, and more strikingly than before.  She was extremely discontented with, and ashamed of, herself, for she had meant to be the equal of the detective, and she had not been.  It was blazingly clear that he had indeed played with her—­or, as she put it in her own mind:  “He just stuffed me up all through.”