Miss Ingate’s sparkling eyes seemed to say:  “Sylvia Pankhurst can be arrested if she likes, and so can Mrs. Despard and Annie Kenney and Jane Foley, or any of them.  But the policeman that is clever enough to catch Miss Ingate of Moze does not exist.  And the gumption of Miss Ingate of Moze surpasses the united gumption of all the other feminists in England.”

“Oh no!  Oh no!  Oh no!” repeated Miss Ingate with mingled complacency, glee, passion, and sardonic tolerance of the whole panorama of worldly existence.  “The police were awful, shocking.  But I was not arrested.”

“Well, I was—­this morning,” said Audrey in a low and poignant voice.

Miss Ingate was startled out of her mood of the detached ironic spectator.

“What?” she frowned.

They heard a servant moving about at the foot of the stairs, and a capped head could be seen through the interstices of the white Chinese balustrade.  The study was the only immediate refuge; Miss Ingate advanced right into it, and Audrey pushed the door to.

“Father’s given me a month’s C.B.”

Miss Ingate, gazing at the girl’s face, saw in its quiet and yet savage desperation the possibility that after all she might indeed be surprised by the vagaries of human nature in the village.  And her glance became sympathetic, even tender, as well as apprehensive.

“‘C.B.’?  What do you mean—­’C.B.’?”

“Don’t you know what C.B. means?” exclaimed Audrey with scornful superiority over the old spinster.  “Confined to barracks.  Father says I’m not to go beyond the grounds for a month.  And to-day’s the second of April!”

“No!”

“Yes, he does.  He’s given me a week, you know, before.  Now it’s a month.”

Silence fell.

Miss Ingate looked round at the shabby study, with its guns, cigar-boxes, prints, books neither old nor new, japanned boxes of documents, and general litter scattered over the voluted walnut furniture.  Her own house was old-fashioned, and she realised it was old-fashioned; but when she came into Flank Hall, and particularly into Mr. Moze’s study, she felt as if she was stepping backwards into history—­and this in spite of the fact that nothing in the place was really ancient, save the ceilings and the woodwork round the windows.  It was Mr. Moze’s habit of mind that dominated and transmogrified the whole interior, giving it the quality of a mausoleum.  The suffragette procession in which Miss Ingate had musically and discreetly taken part seemed to her as she stood in Mr. Moze’s changeless lair to be a phantasm.  Then she looked at the young captive animal and perceived that two centuries may coincide on the same carpet and that time is merely a convention.

“What you been doing?” she questioned, with delicacy.

“I took a strange man by the hand,” said Audrey, choosing her words queerly, as she sometimes did, to produce a dramatic effect.