Alma read the announcement for the second time.
“It seems good,” she said with conventional caution, “though I don’t like the idea of your working, my dear. Your dear father . . .”
“Would have whisked me up to town and I should have had the job by to-night,” said Mirabelle definitely.
But Alma wasn’t sure. London was full of pitfalls and villainy untold lurked in its alleys and dark passages. She herself never went to London except under protest.
“I was there years ago when those horrible Four Just Men were about, my dear,” she said, and Mirabelle, who loved her, listened to the oft-told story. “They terrorized London. One couldn’t go out at night with the certainty that one would come back again alive . . . and to think that they have had a free pardon! It is simply encouraging crime.”
“My dear,” said Mirabelle (and this was her inevitable rejoinder), “they weren’t criminals at all. They were very rich men who gave up their lives to punishing those whom the law let slip through its greasy old fingers. And they were pardoned for the intelligence work they did in the war—one worked for three months in the German War Office—and there aren’t four at all: there are only three. I’d love to meet them—they must be dears!”
When Aunt Alma made a grimace, she was hideous. Mirabelle averted her eyes.
“Anyway, they are not in London now, darling,” she said, “and you will be able to sleep soundly at nights.”
“What about the snake?” asked Miss Alma Goddard ominously.
Now if there was one thing which no person contemplating a visit to London wished to be reminded about, it was the snake.