“No!”
“Yes, he does. He’s given me a week, you know, before. Now it’s a month.”
Silence fell.
Miss Ingate looked round at the shabby study, with its guns, cigar-boxes, prints, books neither old nor new, japanned boxes of documents, and general litter scattered over the voluted walnut furniture. Her own house was old-fashioned, and she realised it was old-fashioned; but when she came into Flank Hall, and particularly into Mr. Moze’s study, she felt as if she was stepping backwards into history—and this in spite of the fact that nothing in the place was really ancient, save the ceilings and the woodwork round the windows. It was Mr. Moze’s habit of mind that dominated and transmogrified the whole interior, giving it the quality of a mausoleum. The suffragette procession in which Miss Ingate had musically and discreetly taken part seemed to her as she stood in Mr. Moze’s changeless lair to be a phantasm. Then she looked at the young captive animal and perceived that two centuries may coincide on the same carpet and that time is merely a convention.
“What you been doing?” she questioned, with delicacy.
“I took a strange man by the hand,” said Audrey, choosing her words queerly, as she sometimes did, to produce a dramatic effect.
“This morning?”
“Yes. Eight o’clock.”
“What? Is there a strange man in the village?”
“You don’t mean to say you haven’t seen the yacht!”