LITMIR.BIZ

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some time or other, there seemed no reason, to her, at any rate, why she should not keep up with Godfrey. He was her trustee now, as well as her oldest friend.

      So it was that she had very willingly assented to do him the trifling favour of spending some further hours in his company.

      As they wandered about the old city, and lingered awhile in the great Minster, neither of them said a word that the whole world might not have overheard. They visited some of the curiosity shops for which York is famed, and Katty's companion, with that new generosity which sat on him so strangely, bought a beautiful, and very costly, old cut-glass pendant for Rosedean.

      They did not meet a soul that either of them knew, excepting, yes, stop——After they had said goodbye (Godfrey, with a rather shocked look on his face, for Katty, imprudent, foolish Katty, had woman-like seemed to expect that he would kiss her in a corner of an empty waiting-room where at any moment they might have been surprised by some acquaintance of one or the other of them!)—after, as arranged, they had said good-bye, and Katty was engaged in taking her ticket for the branch line station for which she was bound, a curious thing happened.

      She suddenly heard a voice, a man's voice, which sounded pleasantly familiar.

      Who could it be? The association evoked was wholly agreeable, but Katty could not place, in the chambers of her memory, the owner of the rather peculiar accents which were engaged in asking when the next train back to London would start.

      She had turned round quickly, only to see a small queue of people behind her, among them surely the owner of that peculiar voice. But no, she did not know any one there—though among them a man attracted her attention, for the simple reason that he was staring at her very hard. He was obviously a foreigner, for his skin was olive-tinted, and he had a small, black, pointed beard. He stared at Katty with an air of rather insolent admiration. And then he broke away from the queue, and walked quickly off, out of the booking-office.

      Katty always enjoyed admiration, whatever its source, and yet a queer kind of shiver had gone through her when this impertinent stranger's glance rested full on her face. She had had the odious sensation that the man saw something to be jeered at, as well as admired, in her neat and attractive self.

      At last, reluctantly, Katty got up and went into her well-warmed comfortable bathroom. It was nice to be home again, at no one's orders but her own. After she had dressed, she rang, and very soon came her breakfast, daintily served by the devoted Harber, also the one daily paper she felt she could afford to take.

      Katty was one of the many women to whom the daily picture-paper supplied a long-felt, if unconscious, want. It gave her just the amount of news, and the kind of news, that her busy mind, absorbed in other things, could assimilate comfortably. She was no reader, though sometimes she would manage to gallop through some book that all the world was talking about. But newspapers had always bored her. Still, she had become very fond of the paper she now held in her hand. It only cost a halfpenny a day, and Katty liked small, sensible economies.

      That liking of hers was one of the links which bound her to Godfrey Pavely, but unlike Godfrey, Katty did not care for money for money's sake. She only liked money for what money could buy. And sometimes, when she was in a cheerful, mischievous mood, she would tell herself, with a smile, that if ever her Castle in Spain turned out to have been built on a solid foundation—if ever, that is, she became Godfrey Pavely's wife, she would know how to spend the money he had garnered so carefully. She felt pretty sure, deep in her heart, that should such an unlikely thing come to pass, she would know how to "manage" Godfrey, and that, if surprised, he would not really mind what she did. She always got good value out of everything she acquired, and that would remain true if, instead of spending pence, she was ever able to spend pounds.

      A little before eleven, just as Katty was beginning to think it was time for her to finish dressing, she heard the gate of her domain open, and the voice of little Alice Pavely rise up through the still, frosty air, mingling with the deeper, gentler tones of Laura.

      It was an odd thing, considering that the two women were at any rate in theory intimate friends, that Laura very, very seldom came to Rosedean. In fact Katty could not remember a single time when Laura had come in the morning, an uninvited, unexpected guest. So suddenly poor Katty felt a little chill of apprehension; she got up from her chair, and waited....

      The front door was opened at once. Then came Harber's hurrying footfalls on the staircase—and, simultaneously, the garden door at the back of the house swung to. Laura had evidently sent her little girl out of doors, into the garden. What could she be coming to say?

      Quickly Katty examined her conscience. No, there was nothing that Laura could possibly have found out. As to that half day spent with Godfrey in York, Laura was surely the last woman to mind—and if she did mind, she was quite the last woman to say anything about it!

      There came a knock at the door: then Harber's voice, "Mrs. Pavely wants to know, ma'am, if she can come up and speak to you, just for a minute."

      "Ask Mrs. Pavely to come up," said Katty, pleasantly.

      A minute later, Laura walked forward into the room. It was the first time she had been in Katty's bedroom since Rosedean had been first furnished.

      She looked round her with a smile. "Why, Katty," she exclaimed, "how charming and pretty you've made it all! You've added quite a number of things since I was here last."

      "Only the curtains," said Katty quickly (oh, how relieved she felt!), "only the curtains, and perhaps that arm-chair, Laura."

      "Yes, I suppose that is all, but somehow it looks more."

      Laura looked exactly as she always looked, rather paler perhaps than usual, but then Laura was pale. She had that peculiar clear, warm whiteness of skin that is compared by its admirers to a camellia; this morning, her lovely, deep blue eyes looked tired, as if she had been sleeping badly.

      "I've really come to ask if you know where Godfrey is? We expected him home on Thursday. Then he sent a telephone message saying that he couldn't be back till yesterday. No time was mentioned, but as he had a lot of appointments at the Bank we of course thought he would be back early. I myself sat up for him last night till after the last train, but now, this morning, I've heard nothing from him—and Mr. Privet has heard nothing."

      "What an odd thing!" exclaimed Katty. She really did think it very odd, for Godfrey was the most precise of men.

      She waited a moment, then said truthfully, "No, I haven't the slightest idea where he is. He wrote me a line late last week about a little investment of mine. I've got the letter somewhere."

      Katty was trying to make up her mind as to whether she should say anything concerning that joint journey to York. At last she decided not to do so. It had nothing to do with Godfrey's absence now.

      "Doesn't Mr. Privet know where he is?" she asked. "That really is very odd, Laura."

      "Of course Mr. Privet knows where Godfrey was up to Thursday morning. He stayed where he always does stay when in London, at the Hungerford Hotel, in Trafalgar Square. He's always stayed there—they know him, and make him very comfortable. But Mr. Privet telephoned through there yesterday—as a matter of fact I've only just heard this—and they told him that Godfrey had left the hotel on Thursday morning. But the extraordinary thing is," and now Laura really did look somewhat troubled—"that they were expecting him back there to pack, to leave for here—at least so the manager understood him to say. He went out in the morning, and then he didn't come back, as they thought he would do, to luncheon. All his things are still at the Hungerford Hotel."

      Katty began to feel a little uneasy. "Perhaps he's had an accident," she said. "After all, accidents do happen. Have you done anything, Laura?"

      Laura shook her head. "What seems to make the theory of an accident unlikely is that telephone message. You see, he telephoned quite late on Thursday saying that he would stay in town over the night. But he didn't send a similar message to the Bank, as any one knowing Godfrey would certainly have expected him to do, and he didn't let them know at the Hungerford Hotel that he would be away for the night. It's all rather mysterious."

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