Chapter 11

Today was the anniversary of the first time he had come into the drawing room to have tea with her. Half a century ago. She saw that she had made a ring in red round that date on the Beautiful Britain calendar that hung on the kitchen wall on top of last year's kitten calendar and the tropical flowers one fromthe year before. Gwendolen had kept all the calendars forevery year back to 1945. They piled up on the kitchen hookand when there was room for no more, the bottom ones were all stuffed away in drawers somewhere. Somewhere. Among books or old clothes or on top of things or under things. The only ones whose whereabouts she was positive about were those from 1949 and 1953.

The 1953 calendar she had found and now kept in the drawingroom for obvious reasons. It recorded all the dates onwhich she had had tea with Stephen Reeves. She had comeupon it by chance last year while looking for the notice which had come from some government department telling her abouta £ 200 fuel payment due to be made to pensioners. And there, alongside it, was the Canaletto Venice calendar. Just seeing it again made her heart flutter. Of course she had never forgotten a single one of their times alone together but seeing it recorded‑ " Dr. Reeves to tea" ‑ somehow confirmed it, made it real, as if she might otherwise have dreamt it. Under the heading of a Wednesday in February she had written, in a rarecomment, " Sadly, no Bertha or any successor to bring our tea. "

Sheltered and quiet as Gwendolen's life had been, perhaps as unruffled as a life can be, it had included a very few peaks of excitement. All of these she thought about from time to time but none with such wonder as her visit to Christie's house. It too was more than fifty years ago now and she had been notmuch over thirty. The maid who carried up the hot water and perhaps even emptied the chamber pots had been with themfor two years. She was seventeen and her name was Bertha. What else she was called Gwendolen couldn't remember, if shehad ever known. The professor never noticed anything about people and Mrs. Chawcer was too wrapped up in working for the Holy Catholic Apostolics to have time for a servant's troubles, but Gwendolen observed the change in the girl's figure. She was with her more than the other occupants of the house.

" You're beginning to get stout, Bertha, " she said, using a favorite word applied to others in the vocabulary of the skeletal Chawcers. Gwendolen was too innocent and ignorant to suspect the truth, and when Bertha confessed it she was deeply shocked.

" But you can't be expecting, Bertha. You're only seventeen and you can't have… " Gwendolen couldn't bring herself to go on.

" As far as that goes, miss, I could have ever since I was eleven, but I never did and now I am. You won't tell the missus or your dad, will you? "

It was an easy promise for Gwendolen to make. She would have died before she mentioned such things to the professor. As for her mother, she couldn't forget how once, when she whispered to Mrs. Chawcer, with much shame and diffidence, of an old man who had exposed himself to her, she had been told never to utter such words again and to wash her mouth out with soap.

" What will you do with the baby? "

" There won't be a baby, miss. I've got the name and address of someone who'll get rid of it for me. "

Gwendolen was not so much in deep waters as in an unknown country peopled with men and women who did forbidden things and spoke a language of words that should never be uttered, a land of mystery and discomfort and ugliness and danger. She wished very much that she hadn't asked Bertha why she was gaining weight. It never occurred to her to be sorry for this young girl who worked ten hours a day for them and was paid very little for performing tasks their own class would shudder to think of. It never entered her mind to put herself in Bertha's shoes and imagine the disgrace which would come to an unmarried mother or the horror of watching herself grow so large that further deception was impossible. She was curious rather against her will, but afraid and anxious to be, uninvolved.

" You'll be all right then, " she said brightly.

" Miss, can I ask you something? "

" I expect so, " said Gwendolen with a smile.

" When I go to him, would you come with me? "

Gwendolen thought this an impertinence. She had been brought up to expect deference from servants and indeed everyone from a " lower class. " But her shyness and her fear of the different and of things she hadn't experienced wasn't absolute. Curiosity was a novelty for her but she felt it worm its way into her mind and wait there, trembling. She might see a little more of this new country which had unprecedently opened its borders to her. Instead of replying to Bertha with a sharp, " Do you know whom you're speaking to? " she said, quite meekly but with an increased beating of the heart, " Yes, if you like. "

The street was squalid, with the old chimney of an iron foundry at the far end of it, the Metropolitan Railway from Ladbroke Grove to Latimer Road running nearby and above ground. The man they had come to see lived at number 10. It smelled and it was dirty. The kitchen was furnished with two deckchairs. Christie might have been in his forties or past fifty, it was hard to tell. He was a tallish but slight man with a beakyface and thick glasses and he seemed dismayed to see Gwendolen. Later on she understood why. Of course she did. He wanted no one else to know Bertha had been there. She refused to sit down. Bertha took one of the chairs and Christie the other. Perhaps she had antagonized him or perhaps he onlyever dealt with his clients tete‑ a‑ tete, but he immediately said he would want to see Bertha alone. For chaperonage, his wife would be present. Gwendolen never saw the wife nor heard anything of her. All they would do now, Christie said, was make an appointment for the examination and the " treatment, " but Miss Chawcer must go. Everything that passed between himself and his patient must be confidential.

" I won't be long, miss, " Bertha said. " If you'd wait for me at the end of the street, I won't be a minute. "

Another impertinence, but Gwendolen did wait. Various passersby stared at her with her carefully made‑ up face, hair permed into sausage curls and her full‑ skirted, tight‑ fitting blue dress. One man whistled at her and Gwendolen's discomfort showed in her darkly flushed cheeks. Eventually Bertha came. " I won't be a minute" was true. She had been at least ten. The appointment was for Bertha's next day off, a week ahead.

" I'm not to tell anyone, miss, and you mustn't. "

But Christie had frightened her. Although Mrs. Christie wasn't there, he had done some strange intimate things, asked her to open her mouth so that he could look down her throat with a mirror on the end of a rod, and asked her to lift her skirt up to mid‑ thigh level.

" I've got to go back, miss, haven't I? I can't have a baby, not unless I'm married. "

Gwendolen felt she ought to have asked about the father of the child, who he was and where he was, did he know about the baby and was there a chance of his marrying Bertha if he did. Itwas too embarrassing, it was too sordid. At home, in the quiet and civilized atmosphere of St. Blaise House, seated comfortably among cushions on the sofa, she was reading Proust, and had reached Volume 7. No one in Proust ever had babies. She retired into her cocooned world.

Bertha never went back to Christie. She was too frightened. By the time Gwendolen read about his murders in the papers, the young women who came to his house for abortions or cures for catarrh, his wife, perhaps too the woman and baby upstairs, it was 1953 and Bertha long gone. She left before the child was born, and someone married her, though whether itwas the father Gwendolen never knew. The whole thing washorribly sordid. But she never forgot her visit to RillingtonPlace and how Bertha too might so easily have been one of those women immured in cupboards or buried in the garden.

Bertha‑ she hadn't thought of her for years. The visit to Christie's house must have been three or four years before his trial and execution. It wasn't worth wasting time looking for the 1949 calendar but what else had she to do with her time? Read, of course. She had long finished Middlemarch, reread Carlyle's French Revolution and completed some of the works of Arnold Bennett, though she considered them too light to spend much time on. Today she would start on Thomas Mann. She had never read him, a dreadful omission, though they had all his works somewhere in the many bookcases.

The British Fungi calendar for 1949‑ what a ridiculous subject! ‑ she found after searching for an hour, in a room on the top floor, next door to Mr. Cellini's flat. In the night gone by, more the hour or so before dawn, she had been awakenedby a scream and a thud she thought came from there but shewas probably mistaken. This was one of the rooms which the professor had insisted it wasn't necessary to have wired for electricity. Gwendolen had been a child at the time but she remembered quite clearly the wiring of the lower floors, the men taking up floorboards and making great caves in the plaster of walls. This morning was bright and hot, light flooding in from the window on which the curtains had fallen into rags sometime in the thirties and never been replaced. It was several years since she had been up here, she couldn't remember when had been the last time.

The bookcase, a store place for ancient, never very readable books there was no room for downstairs, novels by Sabine Baring‑ Gould and R. D. Blackmore among bound numbers of Victorian journals, The Complete Works of Samuel Richardson, and Darwin's The Origin of Species. No Thomas Mann. Perhaps she would reread Darwin instead. She looked in the drawers underneath the shelves. Blunt pencils and elastic bands and receipted bills filled them, along with pieces of broken china in labeled bags someone must have intended to repair but neverhad. The big chest of drawers was her last hope. Taking the fewsteps that would bring her to it, she tripped and would have fallen but for grabbing hold of the top of the chest. One of the floorboards stuck out perhaps half an inch above the rest.

Bending over as best she could, she peered at the floor. He rreading glasses were in one pocket of her cardigan and the magnifying glass in the other. She made use of them. The boards appeared not to be nailed down but they must be and the glasses weren't strong enough for her to see. How odd. Perhaps it was the damp making one of them protrude. There was a lot of it in this old house, rising damp and whatever the other kind was. With some difficulty, she got down on her knees, her joints cracking, and felt the surface of the protrudingboard. Quite dry. Odd, she thought. And all those littleholes were odd too, dozens of them peppering the woodwork. But perhaps it was always like that and she had never noticed. On her feet again, she began to examine the chest. The fungicalendar came to light in the second drawer she looked through, and with it was one of those letters from a property developer, offering her huge sums to sell her house, this one dated 1998. " Why on earth had she put it there five years before? She couldn't remember but she was sure the floorboard hadn't been that way then.

The calendar she took over to the window, the better to read her own handwriting. There it was, for 16June, a Thursday. " Accompanied B. to house in Rillington Place. " She recalled writing that but not the entry for the following day, " Think I may have flu but new doctor says no, only a cold. " The rapid beating of her heart began again and she felt th eneed to put her hand over her ribs as if to hold it still. That wast he first time she had met him. She had gone to the Ladbroke Grove surgery, waited in the waiting room for old Dr. Smyth, but the man who opened the door and smiled, ushering her in, was Stephen Reeves.

Gwendolen let the hand holding the calendar fall down t oher side, and going back in time to her first sight of him in her youth and his, gazed almost unseeing out of the window. Otto lay sleeping on the wall, the crinolined birds pottered about in their wilderness as their owner in a white turban came down the path with corn to feed them. She saw Stephen, his bright smiling eyes, his dark hair, heard him say, " Not many folks waiting this morning. And what can I do for you? "

The weekend would have passed with Danila's disappearance going unnoticed but for Kayleigh Rivers waking up with a bad cold. Danila had worked at Shoshana's Spa every weekday from 8 A. M. till 4 P. M. and Kayleigh worked there on Saturdays and Sunday mornings and every evening from four till eight. Kayleigh tried calling Danila on her mobile to ask her if she'ddo her weekend and when she got no reply, called Madam

Shoshana.

" She's still asleep, isn't she? " Shoshana said. " Like I was. She's got her mobile switched off. Look at the time. "

She waited till eight. The spa didn't open till nine on Saturdays. " When she rang Danila's mobile all she got was dead silence. It might be early, but it was too late to get a temp. She paid her girls‑ illegally‑ ten pounds a week below the minimum wage but Kayleigh needn't think she was paying her for pretending to be ill. As for Danila… Shoshana understood she was going to have to do it herself and she heaved herself unwillingly out of bed. In spite of owning and running a fashionable gym and beauty clinic with manicurist and pedicurist, waxing and electrolysis studio, aromatherapist and salt baths unit, Shoshana paid no personal attention to herself or any of these things and didn't wash much. " When you got older youdidn't need more than a once‑ weekly bath and an occasional dip for hands, face, and feet. Patchouli, cedarwood, cardamom, and nutmeg covered up any possible odors.

She visited the spa itself as little as possible. It interested he ronly insofar as it made money. Exercise and beauty treatments, keeping fit and retaining youth, bored her and when she satdownstairs at the receipt of custom, she tended to fall asleep. Her grandfather and then her mother had run hairdressing establishments, so it had seemed the natural thing to carry on, only on her own terms and with her own ideas in a contemporary form. She would really have liked to be a guru, founder of her own mystic cult, but had been obliged to compromise and settle for soothsaying.

In the underclothes she had taken off the night before with a baggy red velvet dress on top and a knitted shawl, she glanced into the mirror. Even to her uninterested eyes her hair looked in a bad state, dry and sprinkled white with dandruff. She tied it up in a red and purple scarf, rinsed her hands, splashed water on her face, and stumped downstairs. Her temper, never sunny, was going from bad to worse. She had intended to spend the day at a field event organized by her water‑ divining teacher. A final attempt at getting hold of Danila failed and Shoshana perched herself reluctantly on the high stool behind the counter. The first client to arrive thought he recognized her as the old woman he had once seen in a Turkish village and from whom he had bought a carpet in the market square.

It had been the worst night of his life. He had slept fitfully, waking every hour with a raging thirst. The most horrible thing was opening his eyes for the final time at nine in the morning and, for a moment, forgetting entirely what had happened and what he had done. Memory returned almost at once and he groaned aloud.

There had been dreams and in one of them a creature had come across the roofs, climbed on drainpipes to his own window, and tried to make its way in. At first he thought it was ac at, but when he saw its human face, the staring eyes and the great gash in the forehead, he screamed aloud. After that he lay trembling, wondering if old Chawcer had heard.

It was only when he finally got up that the drink of the night before hit him. He poured water down his throat but it seemed to have no effect. His head felt sore all over as if it had been rubbed with sandpaper and an ache inside moved about, sometimes over his eyes, sometimes behind one ear or at the back of his neck. He remembered reading somewhere, in one of thos einterviews she gave, that Nerissa never drank anything alcoholic but subsisted on sparkling water and vegetable juices. Having a bath helped him a little, he felt he wasn't strong enough to face the challenge of a shower, all that water drummingon to the top of his head. But he was almost too weak toget out of the bath and when he was standing on the bathmat, the towel around him, he staggered and almost fell.

Dressing was a long, slow process because movement made the pain in his head shift from front to back and ears to eyes. It was the worst hangover he had ever known. Not a heavydrinker in normal circumstances, he went straight to alcohol in moments of stress. I'm not used to it, that's the trouble, he said to himself. People who were always getting hungover recommended eating, or drinking milk, or the hair of the dog. The thought of any of it made him retch. Once he had been sick he felt slightly better, able to stand upright, drink more water, and put into a carrier bag his blood‑ stained underpants and her clothes‑ a black Wonderbra and the hated tights, black leatherminiskirt and boots, skimpy pink sweater, and a cream‑ coloredfaux fur jacket. Cheap stuff, he judged it, accustomed as he was to the wardrobes of Colette Gilbert‑ Bamber and her friends, supermarket stuff, not even chain store. Her mobile was inside her pink plastic handbag along with her purse with five poundsf ifty in it‑ he put that in his pocket‑ a Switch card, a compact of bronzing powder, a red lipstick, a hairbrush, and her door keys.

He didn't want to think about what had happened, but h ecouldn't help it: her blood running down his beautiful portrait, her eyes looking at him. Well, she had asked for it, she had only got what she asked for, talking about Nerissa like that, daring to find fault with her skin. Jealous, of course. Still, she should have known better than to have said those things to him. She should have recognized him as a dangerous man and should have…

His train of thought was abruptly cut off by the sound of the door to the next room closing. He put a hand up to his chest and clutched at the fabric of his sweatshirt, bunching it up in his fist, he didn't know why, perhaps to hold it against hisheart. It was all he could do to stop himself letting out a moan of fear. Had whoever it was gone into that room or been in there and come out of it? He heard footsteps cross the floor, a noiseas if someone had tripped over, and held his breath. A drawer was opened, then another. The walls must be very thin up here. The old bat it was, of course. He knew her step, an old person's slow and heavy tread. But why was she in there? Hecouldn't remember a previous occasion. She must have heard something in the night, that girl crying out or falling to the floor or even his own movements with bucket and scrubbingbrush. Suppose she wanted to come in here and saw that blood on the wall?

There's nothing for her to see in there, he said to himself, and repeated it, nothing for her to see, nothing. But he would have to know, he couldn't just leave it. Very carefully he opened the front door and put his head round it. The door to the bedroom where she lay under the floorboards was a little ajar. His head ached all over now, a vicious, squeezing, throbbing pain. But he came out, wearing his jacket, carrying the bag with herclothes, the flat key in one pocket, car keys in another. He must have made some sort of sound, one of those involuntary moans or sighs he seemed to have been making all night, for suddenly, as he stood there, Miss Chawcer stumped out of the room and gave him a very unfriendly look.

" Oh, it's you, Mr. Cellini. "

Who did you think it was, Christie? He'd have liked to say that but he was afraid, of her and of the Rillington Place killer too. Of his spirit or whatever it was he'd imagined haunted this place. She said, incomprehensibly, " You look as if you have been frightened by a revenant. "

" Pardon? "

" A ghost, Mr. Cellini, a phantom. 'Revenant' means that which has come back. "

He couldn't stop her seeing the shiver that passed through him. Yet he was furious. Who did she think she was, a bloodys choolteacher and him in the first form? She gave a merrier laugh than he had ever heard come from her.

" Don't tell me you're superstitious. "

He wasn't going to tell her anything. He wanted to ask her what she had been into that room for but he couldn't do that. It was her house, the rooms were all hers. Then he saw she was holding something, an old calendar, it looked like, and a book. Maybe she'd been in there to find those things. A load floatedf rom his shoulders, hovered there, lifting the headache. She took a step back, closed the door behind her. " Someone should report that Indian man to the‑ the powers that be. "

He stared. " What Indian man? "

" The one in the turban with the chickens or whatever they are. " She crossed ahead of him to the top of the stairs, turnedher head. " Are you going out? " She made it sound as if he werebreaking the rules.

" After you, " he said.

He put the bag of clothes into the boot of the car, drove to a row of bins and, opening the clothes bank, dropped her skirtonto the tray. The bin was nearly full and it was with difficulty that he was able to make the tray swing and deposit its load. It wouldn't take any more. Maybe for the rest of the clothes he ought to go some distance away. He found himself drivingtoward Westbourne Grove and, reluctant to pass Shoshana's Spa, turned down Ladbroke Grove toward the Bayswater Road. Thinking of the spa brought into his mind something she had said to him he had forgotten until now. Nerissa wasn't a member. Going there, getting that contract together, chatting up Danila‑ all of it had been a waste of time. She ought tohave told him Nerissa only went there to have her fortune told weeks before. That had been another nail in her coffin, he thought. If ever a woman had asked for what she got, she had.

Driving up the Edgware Road, he passed the Age Concern charity shop but he dared not take clothes in there. Better the bin on the edge of Maida Vale and the other in St. John'sWood. While there he went down the steps in Aberdeen Place and making sure there was no one about, no boat coming, no watcher at one of the overlooking windows, he dropped her mobile and her keys into the canal. Returning the way he had come, he went up Campden Hill Square and parked a little way from Nerissa's house.

Perhaps it was because it comforted him. Just knowing that was her place and that she lived in it‑ with all her servants, no doubt, and maybe a good friend staying‑ made him feel he had something to look forward to. He could put the disposal oft hat girl behind him and move on. What better place to be in than here, thinking of new ways of getting to meet Nerissa? It was a pretty house with its white paint and blue front door, some kind of red flowering plant climbing across it. Her newspaper still lay on the step with a carton of milk beside it. Any minute now a servant would open the door and take in paperand milk. Nerissa would be still in bed. Alone, he was sure, for although he believed he had read everything written about her, there had been very little about boyfriends and no scandal, no shaming photographs of her behaving vulgarly with some man in a club. She was chaste and cool, he thought, waiting for the right man…

The door opened. It wasn't a servant but she herself. Mix could hardly believe his luck. Some of his adoration of her would have been lost if she had been wearing a dressing gown and slippers but she was in a white tracksuit and white trainers. He thought, what would happen if I went up to her and asked for her autograph? But he didn't want her autograph, he wanted her. She went indoors with the milk and the paper and the door closed.

Satisfied and tranquilized by the sight of her, he drove home, went upstairs and nailed down the floorboards in the roomwhere he had put Danila. He'd have a rest and something to eat and then he'd start painting that wall.

In the head office on Monday morning Ed was waiting for him and Ed was furious. " I've been bombarded with calls from those two clients all weekend, I've been persecuted, thanks to you. One of them says she's buying a new elliptical but she won't get it through us and she'll be going elsewhere for her servicing. "

" I don't know what you're on about, mate, " said Mix.

" Don t you, mate, me. You never went near either of them, did you? You couldn't even call them and explain. "

Now Mix remembered Ed's Friday night call. It had come just after he had… Don't think of that. " I forgot. "

" Is that all you've got to say? You forgot? I was very sick, I'l lhave you know. My temperature was high and my throat was killing me. "

" You've recovered very fast, " said Mix, unwilling to stand much more of this. " You're looking pretty fit to me. "

" Fuck you, " said Ed.

He'd get over it. Things never lasted long with Ed, Mix thought. If only he could find out when Nerissa was likely to revisit Madam Shoshana. He was sure that if he met her on the stairs he'd be able to get a date with her. Driving to his firstcall, a workout fanatic who had five machines in her privategym in Hampstead, he began a fantasy of that stairs meeting.

He'd tell her he recognized her at once and now he'd met her he wouldn't go to Madam Shoshana, his fortune and his fate weren't important, but he had something special he wanted to say to her if she'd let him take her to a natural juice bar just a few steps down the street. Of course she would. Women loved that line about something special to tell them and whereas shewouldn't be interested in clubs or pubs, the idea of a natural juice bar would appeal to her. She'd be in her white tracksuit and when they entered the bar all eyes would be on her‑ and on him. He'd even drink carrot juice to please her. When they were seated he'd tell her he'd worshiped her for years, he'd say she was the most beautiful woman in the world and then he'd…

Mix found himself in Flask Walk almost before he knew it, and the exercise junkie waiting with the front door open. She wasn't much to look at, stringy and with a big nose, but flirtatious and with a lithe and lively air about her, which led him to think that there might be something doing. She stayed, watching and admiring, while he adjusted the belt on the treadmill.

It must be great to be so good with your hands, " she gushed.

He stayed much longer than he had expected, missing the call he had promised to make to a woman in Palmers Green, but she was soft, a pushover, she wouldn't complain.

It wasn't until she had posted the letter to Dr. Reeves in Woodstock that a very unpleasant thought came to Gwendolen. Suppose he had truly loved her and then he heard about her visit to Rillington Place. Not when she made that visit, of course, because that had taken place before Christie was even suspected of murdering anyone. Christie wasn't the infamous, appalling creature he had become when his crimes came to light and histrial began, but a nobody, an ordinary little man living in an insalubriousplace. If Stephen Reeves had heard about the visit in those earlier days it would have had no effect on him.

Yet only suppose he had known of the visit at the time because, while making house calls, he had seen her go there. After all, on the very day after she and Bertha had gone to see Christie, she had consulted Dr. Reeves for the first time, and what more likely than that he had recognized her as the woman he had seen in Rillington Place the day before? It would have meant nothing to him then but, at the start of Christie's trial, all of it would have come back to him, and as the vulgar peopleput it, he put two and two together. He had told her in Januarythat he was awfully fond of her, and when Christie's trial began she was certain he had been on the point of proposing to her. Eileen Summers was to be told he no longer cared for her. Gwendolen Chawcer was his true love. But when he read in the newspaper that Christie had lured women to his house by claiming to carry out illegal operations he would naturally have thought Gwendolen had gone there for an abortion. Oh, the horror of it! The shame! Of course, no decent man would want to marry a woman who had had an abortion. And a doctor would be even more set against such a thing.

Gwendolen walked along Cambridge Gardens, thinking of all this and growing more and more dismayed. If only she hadn't posted the letter! She would write another, that was the only thing to do, and she wouldn't wait for a reply. Believing what he did about her, he very likely wouldn't deign to answer her at all. No wonder he hadn't been to her mother's funeral or come back to see her. No wonder he had married Eileen Summers after all. She was brooding along these lines when she came face to face with Olive Fordyce who was walking along with Queenie Winthrop. Queenie had a shopping trolley that she leaned on as if it were a walker, and Olive had Kylie on a lead.

" Goodness, Gwendolen, you were lost in a dream, " saidQueenie. " In another world. Who were you thinking about? Your fancy man? " She winked at Olive, who winked back.

It was too near the bone for Gwendolen. " Don't be stupid. "

" I hope we can all take a joke, " Queenie said ratherdistantly.

Here Olive intervened. " Let's not quarrel. After all, who have we got but each other? "

This went down badly with the other two. " Thank you very much, Olive. I really appreciate that. " Queenie drew herself up to her full five feet one. " I have two daughters, in case you've forgotten, and five grandchildren. "

" We can't all be so lucky, " said Olive peaceably. " Now, Gwen, while I've got the opportunity, I want to ask you a very great favor. It's my niece. May I bring her to see you some time this week because she really is dying to see your house? "

" You say that. " Gwendolen spoke grumpily. " But she won't come, she never does. I go to all that trouble and she can't put herself out to come. "

" She will this time. I promise. And you needn't bother with cakes. We're both on a diet. "

" Really? Well, I suppose she can come. You'll go on and on about it until I say yes. "

" Could we say Thursday? I promise I won't bring my little dog. That's a lovely ring you're wearing. "

" I wear it every day, " said Gwendolen distantly. " I never go out without it. "

" Yes, I've noticed. Is that a ruby? "

" Of course. "

Gwendolen made her way home, cross and dismayed. Nevermind about that silly Olive and the niece, they were just a minor nuisance like a mosquito buzzing round one's bedroom in the night. Nor did Olive's never before noticing the ring matter much. Her only true concern was with Stephen Reeves. The post would have been collected by now and that letterwould be on its way to Woodstock. She must write again and put things straight. All these years he might have been thinking of her as a woman of low morals. He must be made to see her in her true light.