The babble went on round her. She took something off a plate. She answered what was said to her. She even took a sip of the stuff in the cup.
Oh, no. No.
Now that the thing was here-the thing she had been afraid of, so afraid that she would not even formulate it in her mind-now that it was here, made concrete and manifest, she was appalled. It had all suddenly become a nightmare: the bright noisy room with the blackening sky outside where the storm was rushing up, and the missing object. One of those nightmares where something small and irrelevant has a terrifying importance. Where something immediate and urgent must be done about it but one can't think what or why.
Presently she must get up and make polite leavetaking and go to Henrietta with her story and end by saying: "And I know whose shoe it came from. Mary Innes's."
Innes was sitting at her feet, not eating but drinking cocoa thirstily. She had curled her feet under her again, but Lucy had no need for further inspection. Even her faint hope that someone else might be wearing pumps had gone overboard. There was a fine colourful variety of footgear present but not a second pair of pumps.
In any case, no one else had a motive for being in the gymnasium at six o'clock this morning.
"Have some more cocoa," Innes said presently, turning to look at her. But Miss Pym had hardly touched hers.
"Then I must have some more," Innes said, and began to get up.
A very tall thin Junior called Farthing, but known even to the Staff as Tuppence-Ha'penny, came in.
"You're late, Tuppence," someone said. "Come and have a bun." But Farthing stood there, uncertainly.