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fishtail and went softly downstairs. The telephone was in the hall, where Patrick could not hear it; and there would be ample time, if she rang up at once, to waylay the party before they left for the Adelphi.
    She stretched out her hand, she touched the receiver: and in that instant her bluff was called.
    â€˜Burglars!’ said a voice within her mind.
    â€˜Nonsense!’ snapped Lesley.
    But it was no use. Even as her lips formed Elissa’s number her mind switched back to the smell of burning.
    â€˜I tell you there aren’t any matches!’ argued Lesley with herself.
    As quick as thought her mind immediately substituted a masked face at the window, a sudden beam of light—Patrick sitting up shrieking, and a hand over his mouth! Like the original fire-piece, the scene flashed before her with an extraordinary perfection of detail: she could see the hairs on the man’s hand, the stitching on Pat’s collar.…
    Her hand dropped back. Even her hand was in the conspiracy. Lesley regathered the folds of her dress and turned again to the stairs. For her hand was perfectly right. The momentary panic had become a permanent frame of mind; and Lesley had little heart to go out in the certain knowledge that half an hour later she would once more be driven back. Her fears had been disproved, and by the mere sight of Patrick’s slumber: at the bare thought of leaving him, they were again raising their heads.
    With a sudden fierce resentment, a feeling more like hatred than any she had yet experienced, Lesley moved softly into Pat’s room and stood looking down at him. Sweet, deep, untroubled: only a child could sleep like that, a child secure in its tyranny; and for the first time, sick with prevision, she saw that she had given herself into bondage.
    Which would seem to show that the old are sometimes right.

CHAPTER SIX
    The following morning Lesley woke to a mood of cold and bitter lucidity: the mood that should have descended, a week or more earlier, in Mrs. Bassington’s drawing-room. For half an hour, in Toby Ashton’s bed, she lay marshalling the facts, co-ordinating them into a whole, and considering the result with a complete lack of enthusiasm. For the first and dominant fact was this: that her new and permanent home, which incidentally should be found as soon as possible, would have to contain, in addition to Patrick and herself, a maid who slept in. It would mean extra food, extra wages, above all an extra room; it would mean a fifty per cent increase in expenditure, and with nothing to show but the same liberty of movement to which she had always been accustomed.
    Lesley turned over in bed and reached for a cigarette: then suddenly altered her mind and took the dressing-gown instead. A certain natural efficiency, almost atrophied by disuse, was urging her to be up: she felt an impulse towards paper and pen, towards rows of figures and division by fifty-two. Bathing, dressing, powdering, the impulse persisted; till at breakfast she took a pencil and did arithmetic on The Times.
    The result was so depressing, and many of the items so inevitably provisional, that she scored all through and turned instead to look for a flat. At the enormous number to be let her confidence returned a little; and having noted down the addresses of the dozen most attractive, Lesley put on her hat and went out for the morning.
    2
    The first of the flats was in Hyde Park Terrace, the last in Campden Hill: at each of which addresses, as at the ten intervening, there successively took place either one or other of the following dialogues.
    â€œGood morning,” said Lesley.
    â€œGood morning,” replied the housekeeper. (She was twice a landlady, and once a reception-clerk: but the term will serve.)
    â€œI want,” continued Lesley, “four rooms, furnished, kitchen and bath.”
    The housekeeper, smiling affably, would then lead the way. All housekeepers smiled to begin with, for there