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anything about the business side yet.’
    Janet frowned.
    ‘There wouldn’t be any business side, only Hugo forgot to sign my cheque, and as he is probably well off the map by now, there is no saying when I can get hold of him. You can lend me ten pounds.’
    ‘Darling, you can’t live on ten pounds!’
    Janet laughed.
    ‘You don’t know what you can do till you try. Only this time I’m not trying. I shall have a fortnight nice and free in Ford House, and I’ve got something in the savings bank. With your ten pounds, I shall get through, even if Hugo doesn’t communicate – and he probably will, because he’ll want to know if there’s anything about his play. I ought to be going.’
    Star put out a hand and caught at her.
    ‘Not yet. I always feel safe when you are somewhere about. I don’t mean with me, but when I know I can just ring you up and say come along and you’ll come, like I did tonight. And when I think of being right over on the other side of the Atlantic I get a horrid kind of shivery feeling, as if there was a lump of ice right down inside me and it wouldn’t melt. You don’t think it could be a presentiment, do you?’
    ‘How could it!’
    Star said weakly,
    ‘I don’t know – nobody does. But people have them. One of my Rutherford great-aunts had one. She was going on a pleasure trip, I don’t remember where, and just as she was going to step on board she had a most dreadful cold feeling and she couldn’t do it. So she didn’t. And everyone else was drowned. That was her portrait in Uncle Archie’s study, in a little lace cap and one of those Victorian shawls. She married an astronomer, and they went to live in the south of England. So it just goes to show, doesn’t it?’
    Janet let this go by. She had known Star for so many years that she did not expect her to be logical. She said cheerfully,
    ‘Well, you needn’t go if you don’t want to – need you? You can always send Jimmy Du Parc a cable to tell him you’ve got cold feet and he can give Jean Pomeroy your part. It’s perfectly simple.’
    Star pinched hard.
    ‘I’d rather die!’ she said. ‘And you don’t believe in presentiments, do you?’
    ‘I don’t know. What I do know is that you can’t have it both ways. If you want this part you’ll have to go to New York for it. It isn’t going to come to you.’
    ‘It’s a marvellous part! I should be right on the top of my own particular wave! Janet, I’ve got to do it! And as long as you are with Stella I shall know that it’ll be perfectly all right. You do think it will be all right, don’t you?’
    ‘I can’t see why not.’
    ‘No – I’m just being silly. I do hate going on journeys. Not when I’m actually doing them – that’s rather fun – but the night before. It’s like looking from a nice bright lighted room and not wanting to go out into the dark.’
    Janet laughed.
    ‘You are not very likely to find it dark in New York!’ she said.
    When she had gone, Star picked up the telephone receiver and dialled quickly. The voice that answered was as familiar to her as her own.
    ‘Ninian – it’s Star.’
    ‘It would be!’
    ‘I’ve rung you up three times, and you’ve always been out!’
    ‘I do go out!’
    ‘Ninian, I’ve just had Janet here—’
    ‘Epoch-making intelligence!’
    ‘That idiot Edna has let Nanny go off on holiday somewhere on the continent.’
    ‘That bourne from which no traveller returns!’
    ‘Oh, she’ll return all right, but not for a fortnight – and I’m off to New York.’
    ‘I know you are. I’m coming to see you off.’
    ‘Well, you wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for Janet. I couldn’t go away and leave Stella without somebody.’
    ‘Well, I should have said Ford House was rather overstocked with women.’
    ‘I wouldn’t leave Stella with one of them! What I rang up to say was that Janet is going down to look after her.’
    There was something of a pause. Then Ninian Rutherford