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nose, attend to her make-up and adjust her head scarf.
    â€œReady?’’ he asked, at length.
    â€œYes.’’
    They were in the hall when Mrs. Ogden came out of the kitchen. Colin agreed at once to everything she proposed. His only wish just now was to leave Margaret at the hotel and go on to the police station.
    As they were moving off in his car Colin told her this. She did not speak, so he went on irritably, “I don’t want Stephen playing the fool over this. It isn’t a thing to be taken lightly.’’
    That roused her.
    â€œI don’t think Steve is taking it lightly. I don’t think giving a good meal to a hungry, cold, shocked man is a comedy act at all.’’
    â€œThe police are quite humane. They can and do provide proper food when necessary. The point is he must go to them first .’’
    â€œHe intended to. Didn’t you hear him say so?’’
    â€œI don’t know that I can trust him.’’
    Margaret stared through the windscreen at the piled snow drifts, white and sparkling in the beam from the headlights. She said, passionately, “Don’t you think he has suffered enough?’’

Chapter Four
    The London home of the Brentwoods was in Kensington, lying between Notting Hill Gate and the High Street, but closer to the former. It did not form part of a square, but simply one of a row, with gardens at the back and a mews beyond the gardens. Being situated on the side of a hill the garden lay at a lower level than the front of the house, so that to reach it you had to walk down iron steps from a small iron balcony which led out of the ground-floor drawing-room. The tradesmen’s entrance, still marked as such at the Brentwood establishment, simply ran down an inclined path beside the house to semi-basement kitchen premises, whose main source of light at the back was a large window, strongly barred, lying underneath the iron balcony. In the front an area window provided a distorted view of the street and the front door.
    Unlike many of the houses in that district the Brentwoods’ was as broad as it was high. It had rooms on either side of the front door and a mere two storeys in all. This fact, in contrast with most of the other roads in the neighbourhood had to be repeated and impressed upon the Ogdens for several months after they settled there. Even in June they were still grumbling mildly over the perpetual ‘up and down’ which they so much resented. And from unshakeable suspicions of damp, mildew and other troglodyte menaces, they had moved on, as summer advanced, to hints of suffocation, oven-life and melting.
    They did not, however, threaten to return north. Their devotion to Colin, which he found touching and Margaret a surprise, was entire. They could not understand why the Brentwoods had found servants so difficult to get and so impossible to keep, before they themselves took the post. But they simply accepted the general reference to foreigners without attempting to discover the details of their failure. They even tried to tolerate the Swiss au pair girl, Louise, who was staying on to complete her year with the Brentwoods. Between themselves they felt they were protecting Mr. Colin from inevitable exploitation by such people. At any rate Mrs. Ogden had now reduced the kitchen to order and restored the pots and pans to a proper condition of bright cleanliness after their misuse in preparing the ‘foreign messes’ that Louise had inflicted upon the household.
    The Brentwoods submitted to this return to tradition with thankfulness, tinged on Margaret’s part with a small guilt. Colin was merely thankful. It served to keep fresh his memory of his home, without which life for him would be dark indeed. Eating Mrs. Ogden’s roast beef and Yorkshire pudding took him back firmly to his boyhood. This and other manifestations of continuity, of permanence in his present circumstances, were very necessary