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once.
    “How thrilling. James has to go up North for a few days in March. I have a wonderful nanny who adores Jamie and he her. So I could come to London for a few days and we’ll have an orgy of shopping.”
    As the weeks passed the prospect of travelling abroad so enchanted me that I forgot the disadvantages that would go with it.
    In due course Felicity came to London and as I had expected she threw herself wholeheartedly into the business of finding the right clothes. I was aware that she regarded me in a different light now that I was no longer a schoolgirl.
    “Your hair is most striking,” she said.
    “Your greatest asset. We’ll have to plan with that in mind.”
    “My hair?” I had not thought about it before, except that it was unusually fair. It was long, straight and thick.
    “It’s the colour of corn,” said Felicity.
    “It’s what they call golden.
    It really is very attractive. You’ll be able to do all sorts of things with it. You can wear it piled high on your head when you want to be dignified or tied back with a ribbon or even plaited when you want to look demure. You can have a lot of fun with it. And we’ll concentrate on blue to bring out the colour of your eyes. “
     
    My parents had gone to Oxford so we reverted to old customs and had our meals in the kitchen. It was just like old times and we prevailed on Mr. Dolland to do his Hamlet or Henry V and the eerie excerpts from The Bells for the sake of the old days.
    We missed Nanny Pollock but I wrote and told her what was happening and she was now very happy, completely absorbed by little Evelyn who was a ‘pickle’ and reminded her of what I had been at her age.
    I paraded round the kitchen in my new garments which resulted in oohs and ahs from Meg and Emily and a few caustic comments from Mrs. Harlow who muttered something about fashions nowadays.
    It was a very happy time and it did occur to me now and then that the preliminaries of travel might be more pleasant than the actuality.
    It was with regret that I said goodbye to Felicity and she returned to Oxford. The day was fast approaching when we would set out for Tilbury to board the Atlantic Star.
    There was constant talk of the coming trip in the kitchen. None of them had been abroad, not even Mr. Dolland, although he had almost gone to Ireland once; but that, as Mrs. Harlow pointed out, was another kettle of fish. I was going to see real foreign parts and that could be hazardous.
    You never knew where you were with foreigners, commented Mrs. Harlow and I’d be seeing a lot of them. She wouldn’t have wanted to go, not even if she was offered a hundred pounds to do so.
    Meg said: “Well, nobody’s going to offer you a hundred pounds to go abroad, Mrs. H. So you’re safe.”
    Mrs. Harlow looked sourly at Meg who, according to her, was always getting above herself.
    However, the constant talk of abroad-its attractions and its drawbacks-was suddenly overshadowed by the murder.
    We first heard of it from the newsboys shouting in the
     
    streets. “
    “Orrible murder. Man found shot through the head in empty farmhouse.”
    Emily was sent out to buy a paper and Mr. Dolland sat at the table, wearing his spectacles and reading to the assembled company.
    The murder was the main news at this time, there being nothing else’iof importance going on. It was called the Bindon Boys Murder and the Press dealt with it in lurid fashion so that people everywhere were reading of the case and wondering what was going to happen next.
    Mr. Dolland had his own theories and Mrs. Harlow reckoned that Mr. Dolland had as good a notion of such things as any of the police. It was because of the plays he knew so much about and many of them were concerned with murder.
    “They ought to call him in, I reckon,” she pronounced.
    “He’d soon put them to rights.”
    Meanwhile, basking in the glory of such admiration, Mr. Dolland would sit at the table and expound his views.
    “It must be this young