“I told you the job should be done. We’re short-handed.”
“Will it go in at once, within twenty-four hours?”
“Yes, it will.” He paused, adding cringingly:
“I didn’t mean to give offence, sir.”
Grimshaw replied tensely:
“Good. Keep what I’ve said to yourself, and I shall do the same.”
Within the time exacted the new flooring was put in. Grimshaw knew, of course, that he had made a dangerous enemy, but this heartened rather than dismayed him, salving a sensitive conscience. He believed that he could deal with Gridley, and through Gridley with others. Lady Selina must be left in peace till peace came back to a world in travail.
CHAPTER IV
CHIEFLY CONCERNING CICELY
I
Cicely, till the war broke out, accepted life very much as she found it, although at school a glimmering had come to her that it wasn’t for all girls the pleasant pilgrimage from cradle to altar, and thence in the remote future to the grave, which a daughter of the House of Chandos might naturally deem it. She and Arabella Tiddle had agreed that they belonged to the Sunshiners, as Arabella put it—flowers in a parterre, carefully tended and cherished. It must be awful, for instance, to be like Miss Spong and Miss Minchin, assistant mistresses, labelled by their pupils as “Spot” and “Plain.” Everybody knew that Miss Spong’s father drank, even on Sundays; and Miss Minchin, it was generally believed, worked hard during the “hols” as a typist. The whole school had sustained an appalling shock when little Doris Reed mysteriously vanished from a classroom and was never seen again. Her father, a fraudulent bankrupt, had walked into a tunnel, preferring to meet an express train rather than his infuriated creditors. All the details were in the daily papers. One of Cicely’s friends, a queer, tall, scraggy girl, interested herself in criminology, collecting clippings wherever she might find them which set forth horrors. She was honourably known as “Old Goose-flesh,” and possessed a perfectly thrilling brooch revealing under crystal a tiny strand of a rope upon which a murderer had been hanged!