Leonie answered quickly, breaking her aunt’s words.

“I have no idea!  I haven’t heard from him since he left England.”

“Huh!” said Susan Hetth, putting up an absolute smoke screen, “and what will you do after the money is spent, pray?”

Leonie stared wide-eyed into the tobacco haze.  “That,” she said slowly, “is on the knees of the gods!”

Talking being temporarily suspended by the band in the death throes of the overture to Zampa, the two women sat silent; one frantically trying to solve financial problems, the other with her head a little on one side as though trying to catch the thread of some conversation.

A strange thing happened as the band stopped.

Leonie rose quite suddenly, with a half-eaten cake half-way to her mouth.

“I must go!” she said quite flatly, placing the cake on a plate and looking at her aunt without seeing her.

“Go!” shrilled Susan Hetth, putting her fourth cup of tea down with an irritated slam.  “Where on earth to?”

But Leonie turned and walked away with never a word of explanation, and her aunt, with the thrifty side of her plebeian soul uppermost, turned to the task of getting through as much as possible of what was left of the two teas for which two shillings had been paid.

The porter looked hard at Leonie when she asked for a taxi, hesitated for a moment, looked hard again, and refrained from putting the question hovering on his tongue.

“Seemed quite dazed like,” he explained later to his wife in Camberwell as she juggled with sausages, “pale as death, with a kind of funny look round her eyes!”

“To the British Museum,” Leonie said through the window as the taxi door closed, and the funny look round her eyes deepened into a line of perplexity between the eyebrows, as the cab bore her swiftly to her destination and her destiny.

She walked swiftly up the steps to the institution she was visiting for the first time, and through the glass swing doors, just as though she was hurrying to an appointment; she turned, without hesitating, sharply to the left up the long flight of stairs, passed through the rooms filled with relics of Rome found in Britain, and stopped.

Just for a second she put the palm of her ungloved hand against her forehead, sighed quickly, with her head bent forward, then passed through the doorway, turned to the left, stopped and said “Yes?”

And the man, in faultless western clothes save for the white turban which with its regulation folds outlined the pale bronze face, with a look of satisfaction in the dark eyes, salaamed before the beautiful woman who had looked at him questioningly.

“Allow me!” he said simply, bending to pick up the glove she had dropped, the smile of satisfaction deepening as he looked at her again.

She had turned from him, and stock-still was staring into the glass case which lined the wall.