me and which I nursed there under my arm. "They're the opening
chapters of his new book," I said. "Fancy my satisfaction at being
allowed to carry them to my room!"

She turned away, leaving me to take my candlestick from the table in
the hall; but before we separated, thinking it apparently a good
occasion to let me know once for all since I was beginning, it would
seem, to be quite "thick" with my host--that there was no fitness in
my appealing to her for sympathy in such a case; before we separated,
I say, she remarked to me with her quick fine well-bred inveterate
curtness: "I daresay you attribute to me ideas I haven't got. I
don't take that sort of interest in my husband's proof-sheets. I
consider his writings most objectionable!"



CHAPTER III



I had an odd colloquy the next morning with Miss Ambient, whom I
found strolling in the garden before breakfast. The whole place
looked as fresh and trim, amid the twitter of the birds, as if, an
hour before, the housemaids had been turned into it with their dust-
pans and feather-brushes. I almost hesitated to light a cigarette
and was doubly startled when, in the act of doing so, I suddenly saw
the sister of my host, who had, at the best, something of the
weirdness of an apparition, stand before me. She might have been
posing for her photograph. Her sad-coloured robe arranged itself in
serpentine folds at her feet; her hands locked themselves listlessly