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goes on there. I really can’t take much more, Verry. I’m going to Greengages.”
    “When?” asked Verity, conscious of a jolt under her ribs.
    “My dear, on Monday. I’m hoping your chum can do something for me.”
    “I hope so, too.”
    “What did you say? Your voice sounded funny.”
    “I hope it’ll do the trick.”
    “I wrote to him, personally, and he answered at once. A charming letter, so understanding and informal.”
    “Good.”
    When Sybil prevaricated she always spoke rapidly and pitched her voice above its natural register. She did so now and Verity would have taken long odds that she fingered the hair at the back of her head.
    “Darling,” she gabbled,“ you couldn’t give me a boiled egg, could you? For lunch? Tomorrow?”
    “Of course I could,” said Verity.
    She was surprised, when Sybil arrived, to find that she really did look unwell. She was a bad colour and clearly had lost weight. But apart from that there was a look — how to define it? — a kind of blankness, of a mask almost. It was a momentary impression and Verity wondered if she had only imagined she saw it. She asked Sybil if she’d seen a doctor and was given a fretful account of a visit to the clinic in Great Quintern, the nearest town. An unknown practitioner, she said, had “rushed over her” with his stethoscope, “pumped up her arm” and turned her on to to a dim nurse for other indignities. Her impression had been one of complete professional detachment. “One might have been drafted, darling, into some yard, for all he cared. The deadliest of little men with a signet ring on the wrong finger. All right, I’m a snob,” said Sybil crossly and jabbed at her cutlet.
    Presently she reverted to her gardener. Bruce as usual had been “perfect,” it emerged. He had noticed that Sybil looked done up and had brought her some early turnips as a present. “Mark my words,” she said. “There’s something
in
that man. You may look sceptical, but there is.”
    “If I look sceptical it’s only because I don’t understand. What sort of thing is there in Bruce?”
    “You know
very
well what I mean. To be perfectly frank and straightforward — breeding. Remember,” said Sybil surprisingly, “Ramsay MacDonald.”
    “Do you think Bruce is a blue-blooded bastard? Is that it?”
    “Stranger things have happened,” said Sybil darkly. She eyed Verity for a moment or two and then said airily: “He’s not very comfortable with the dreary little Black sister — tiny dark room and nowhere to put his things.”
    “Oh?”
    “Yes. I’ve been considering,” said Sybil rapidly, “the possibility of housing him in the stable block — you know, the old coachman’s quarters. They’d have to be done up, of course. It’d be a good idea to have somebody on the premises when we’re away.”
    “You’d better watch it, old girl,” Verity said, “or you’ll find yourself doing a Queen Victoria to Bruce’s Brown.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Sybil.
    She tried without success to get Verity to fix a day when she would come to a weight-reducing luncheon at Greengages.
    “I do think it’s the least you can do,” she said piteously. “I’ll be segregated among a tribe of bores and dying for gossip. And besides you can bring me news of Prue.”
    “But I don’t see Prue in the normal course of events.”
    “Ask her to lunch, darling.
Do
.”
    “Syb, she’d be bored to sobs.”
    “She’d adore it. You
know
she thinks you’re marvellous. It’s odds-on she’ll confide in you. After all, you’re her godmother.”
    “It doesn’t follow as the night the day. And if she should confide I wouldn’t hear what she said.”
    “There
is
that difficulty, I know,” Sybil conceded. “You must tell her to scream. After all, her friends seem to hear her. Gideon Markos does, presumably. And that’s not all.”
    “Not all what?”
    “All my woe. Guess who’s turned up?”
    “I can’t imagine.
Not
,” Verity