“He’s invented a beautiful new trick for keeping me in when he’s out. I have to copy his beastly Society letters for him.”
“I see he’s got a new box,” observed Miss Ingate, glancing into the open cupboard in which stood the safe. On the top of the safe were two japanned boxes, each lettered in white: “The National Reformation Society.” The uppermost box was freshly unpacked and shone with all the intact pride of virginity.
“You should read some of the letters. You really should, Winnie,” said Audrey. “All the bigwigs of the Society love writing to each other. I bet you father will get a typewriting machine this year, and make me learn it. The chairman has a typewriter, and father means to be the next chairman. You’ll see.... Oh! What’s that? Listen!”
“What’s what?”
A faint distant throbbing could be heard.
“It’s the motor! He’s coming back for something. Fly out of here, Winnie, fly!”
Audrey felt sick at the thought that if her father had returned only a few minutes earlier he might have trapped her at the safe itself. She still kept one hand behind her.
Miss Ingate, who with all her qualities was rather easily flustered, ran out of the dangerous room in Audrey’s wake. They met Mr. Mathew Moze at the half-landing of the stairs.
He was a man of average size, somewhat past sixty years. He had plump cheeks, tinged with red; his hair, moustache and short, full beard, were quite grey. He wore a thick wide-spreading ulster, and between his coat and waistcoat a leather vest, and on his head a grey cap. Put him in the Strand in town clothes, and he might have been taken for a clerk, a civil servant, a club secretary, a retired military officer, a poet, an undertaker—for anything except the last of a long line of immovable squires who could not possibly conceive what it was not to be the owner of land. His face was preoccupied and overcast, but as soon as he realised that Miss Ingate was on the stairs it instantly brightened into a warm and rather wistful smile.
“Good morning, Miss Ingate,” he greeted her with deferential cordiality. “I’m so glad to see you back.”