The instance of Aguilar, the head-gardener and mechanic, well illustrated her pusillanimity.  She loathed Aguilar; her mother loathed him; the servants loathed him.  He had said at the inquest that the car was in perfect order, but that Mr. Moze was too excitable to be a good driver.  His evidence was true, but the jury did not care for his manner.  Nor did the village.  He had only two good qualities—­honesty and efficiency; and these by their rarity excited jealousy rather than admiration.  Audrey strongly desired to throw the gardener-mechanic upon the world; it nauseated her to see his disobliging face about the garden.  But he remained scathless, to refuse demanded vegetables, to annoy the kitchen, to pronounce the motor-car utterly valueless, and to complain of his own liver.  Audrey had legs; she had a tongue; she could articulate.  Neither wish nor power was lacking in her to give Aguilar the supreme experience of his career.  And yet she did not walk up to him and say:  “Aguilar, please take a week’s notice.”  Why?  The question puzzled her and lowered her opinion of herself.

She was similarly absurd in the paramount matter of the safe.  The safe could not be opened.  The village, having been thrilled by four stirring days of the most precious and rare fever, had suffered much after the funeral from a severe reaction of dullness.  It would have suffered much more had the fact not escaped that the safe could not be opened.  In the deep depression of the day following the funeral the village could still say to itself:  “Romance and excitement are not yet over, for the key of the Moze safe is lost, and the will is in the safe!”

The village did not know that there were two keys to the safe and that they were both lost.  Nobody knew that except Audrey and Miss Ingate and Mr. Cowl.  The official key was lost because Mr. Moze’s key-ring was lost.  The theory was that it had been jerked out of his pocket in the accident.  Persistent search for it had been unsuccessful.  As for the unofficial or duplicate key, Audrey could not remember where she had put it after her burglary, the conclusion of which had been disturbed by Miss Ingate.  At one moment she was quite sure that she had left the key in the safe, but at another moment she was equally sure that she was holding the key in her right hand (the bank-notes being in her left) when Miss Ingate entered the room; at still another moment she was almost convinced that before Miss Ingate’s arrival she had run to the desk and slipped the key back into its drawer.  In any case the second key was irretrievable.  She discussed the dilemma very fully with Miss Ingate, who had obligingly come to stay in the house.  They examined every aspect of the affair, except Audrey’s guiltiness of theft, which both of them tacitly ignored.  In the end they decided that it might be wiser not to conceal Audrey’s knowledge of the existence of a second key; and they told Mr. Cowl, because he happened to be at hand.  In so doing they were ill-advised, because Mr. Cowl at once acted in a characteristic and inconvenient fashion which they ought to have foreseen.