“You should read some of the letters.  You really should, Winnie,” said Audrey.  “All the bigwigs of the Society love writing to each other.  I bet you father will get a typewriting machine this year, and make me learn it.  The chairman has a typewriter, and father means to be the next chairman.  You’ll see....  Oh!  What’s that?  Listen!”

“What’s what?”

A faint distant throbbing could be heard.

“It’s the motor!  He’s coming back for something.  Fly out of here, Winnie, fly!”

Audrey felt sick at the thought that if her father had returned only a few minutes earlier he might have trapped her at the safe itself.  She still kept one hand behind her.

Miss Ingate, who with all her qualities was rather easily flustered, ran out of the dangerous room in Audrey’s wake.  They met Mr. Mathew Moze at the half-landing of the stairs.

He was a man of average size, somewhat past sixty years.  He had plump cheeks, tinged with red; his hair, moustache and short, full beard, were quite grey.  He wore a thick wide-spreading ulster, and between his coat and waistcoat a leather vest, and on his head a grey cap.  Put him in the Strand in town clothes, and he might have been taken for a clerk, a civil servant, a club secretary, a retired military officer, a poet, an undertaker—­for anything except the last of a long line of immovable squires who could not possibly conceive what it was not to be the owner of land.  His face was preoccupied and overcast, but as soon as he realised that Miss Ingate was on the stairs it instantly brightened into a warm and rather wistful smile.

“Good morning, Miss Ingate,” he greeted her with deferential cordiality.  “I’m so glad to see you back.”

“Good morning, good morning, Mr. Moze,” responded Miss Ingate.  “Vehy nice of you.  Vehy nice of you.”

Nobody would have guessed from their demeanour that they differed on every subject except their loyalty to that particular corner of Essex, that he regarded her and her political associates as deadly microbes in the national organism, and that she regarded him as a nincompoop crossed with a tyrant.  Each of them had a magic glass to see in the other nothing but a local Effendi and familiar guardian angel of Moze.  Moreover, Mr. Moze’s public smile and public manner were irresistible—­until he lost his temper.  He might have had friends by the score, had it not been for his deep constitutional reserve—­due partly to diffidence and partly to an immense hidden conceit.  Mr. Moze’s existence was actuated, though he knew it not, by the conviction that the historic traditions of England were committed to his keeping.  Hence the conceit, which was that of a soul secretly self-dedicated.

Audrey, outraged by the hateful hypocrisy of persons over fifty, and terribly constrained and alarmed, turned vaguely back up the stairs.  Miss Ingate, not quite knowing what she did, with an equal vagueness followed her.