Mrs. Crofton is very sorry to hear that Piper has lost his good situation.  She will try and hear of something that will suit him.  Mrs. Crofton cannot see Mrs. Piper for the present, as she is leaving home to start on a round of visits, but she will keep in touch with Mr. and Mrs. Piper and hopes to hear of something that may suit Piper very soon.

She began by writing “Mr. Piper,” on one of her pretty black-edged mauve envelopes; then she altered the “Mr.” to “Mrs.”  After all it was Piper’s wife who had written to her, and she suddenly remembered with a slight feeling of apprehension, that Mrs. Piper, for some reason best known to herself, had not told Piper that she was writing.  On the other hand it was quite possible that the husband and wife had concocted the letter between them.

Having addressed the envelope, she suddenly got up and ran up to her bedroom.  There she opened her dressing-table drawer.  Quite at the back lay an envelope containing four L5 notes.  She took one of the notes, and running down again, slipped it in the envelope and added a postscript to her letter:—­

  Mrs. Crofton sends L5, which she hopes will be of use while Piper is
  out of a situation.

She went downstairs, giving her letter, on her way back to the drawing-room, to the cook to take out to the post-box.

As she opened the drawing room door, something which struck her as a little odd happened.  Her two visitors, the murmur of whose voices she had heard in deep, eager converse while she was stepping across her hall, abruptly stopped talking, and she wondered uneasily what they could have been saying that neither wished her to hear.

As a matter of fact that sudden silence was owing to a kindly, old-fashioned, wholly “ladylike” instinct, on the part of the two older women.  Miss Crofton had been talking of her brother’s death, confiding to Miss Pendarth her desire to learn something more as to how it had actually come about.  With what was for her really eager sympathy, Miss Pendarth had offered to write to a friend in Essex, in order to discover the name of the local paper where, without doubt, a full account of the inquest on Colonel Crofton must have been published.

CHAPTER XIV

Saturday, Sunday, Monday, slipped away, and on Tuesday there seemed no reason why Godfrey Radmore should leave Old Place.  And so he stayed on, nominally from day to day, settling down, as none of them would have thought possible that anyone now a stranger could settle down, to the daily round and common task of the life led by the Tosswill family.  After two or three days he even began to take command of the younger ones, and Janet was secretly amused to see how he shamed both Rosamund and Dolly into doing something like their full share of the housework.