Now it was an almost unprecedented thing for two members of the small trades-man class to come into Miss Ford’s drawing-room, especially on a Wednesday.  The utmost social mingling of the classes that those walls had ever seen was the moment when Miss Ford asked the electric light man what he thought of the war.  The electric light man’s reply had been quoted in the dialect on two or three of the following Wednesdays, as a proof of Miss Ford’s daring intimacy with men in Another Station of Life.  Really it would have been simpler, though of course not so picturesque, to have quoted it direct from its original source, John Bull, the electric light man’s Bible.

The entrance of the witch and the Mayor was to a certain extent a crisis, but Miss Ford kept her head, and her three friends, though grasping at once the extraordinary situation, did not give way to panic.

“Well, well, well,” said the Mayor, looking round and breathing very loudly.  “This is a cosy little nook you’ve got ’ere.”

He was not at all at his ease, but being a business man, and being also blessed with a peculiarly inexpressive face, he was successfully dissembling his discomfort.

For it had happened that the lift had been one of those lifts that can do no wrong, the kind that the public is indulgently allowed to work by itself.  And the Mayor, looking upon this fact as specially planned by a propitious god of love, had tried to kiss the witch as they shot up the darkened shaft.  If I remind you that the witch was still accompanied by her broomstick, Harold, a creature of unreasoning fidelity, I need hardly describe the scene further.  The Mayor stepped out of the lift with a tingling scraped face, and if he had possessed enough hair on his head, it would have been on end.  As it was, when the lift stopped, he retrieved his hat from the floor with a frank oath, and, as the witch had at once rung the bell of Miss Ford’s flat, he instinctively followed her across that threshold.

She looked round in the hall, and said with a friendly smile:  “I’m afraid Harold gets a bit irritable sometimes.  I often tell him to count ten before he lets himself go, but he forgets.  Did he hurt you?”

I am afraid the angry Mayor did not give Harold credit for much initiative.

“Kissing is such a funny habit, isn’t it,” said the witch briskly as she shook Miss Ford’s hand.  “I wonder who decided in the first place which forms of contact should express which forms of emotion.  I wonder——­”

She interrupted herself as her eyes fell on some green sandwiches which were occupying the third floor of a wicker Eiffel Tower beside Miss Ford.  “Oh how gorgeous,” she said.  “Do you know, I’ve only had two meals in the last two days.”

Nobody present had ever been obliged to miss a meal, so this statement seemed to every one to be a message from another world.

“You must tell us about all your experiences, my dear Miss Watkins,” said Miss Ford, leading the witch towards a chair by the fire.  The witch sat down suddenly cross-legged on the hearth-rug, leaving her rather embarrassed hostess in the air, so to speak, towering rigidly above her.