Even if she opened them—though what she could be doing on that lonely road I can’t imagine—even if she opened them and looked inside she would not know about my mother and me.”

“No chance of her having made friends with a maid? Or a gardener?”

“We have never had a gardener, because there is nothing but grass. And we have not had a maid for a year. Just a girl from the farm who comes in once a week and does the rough cleaning.”

Robert said sympathetically that it was a big house to have on her hands unaided.

“Yes; but two things help. I am not a house-proud woman. And it is still so wonderful to have a home of our own that I am willing to put up with the disadvantages. Old Mr. Crowle was my father’s cousin, but we didn’t know him at all. My mother and I had always lived in a Kensington boarding-house.” One corner of her mouth moved up in a wry smile. “You can imagine how popular Mother was with the residents.” The smile faded. “My father died when I was very little. He was one of those optimists who are always going to be rich tomorrow. When he found one day that his speculations had not left even enough for a loaf of bread on the morrow, he committed suicide and left Mother to face things.”

Robert felt that this to some extent explained Mrs. Sharpe.

“I was not trained for a profession, my life has been spent in odd-jobs. Not domestic ones—I loathe domesticity—but helping in those lady-like businesses that abound in Kensington. Lampshades, or advising on holidays, or flowers, or bric-à-brac. When old Mr. Crowle died I was working in a tea-shop—one of those morning-coffee gossip shops. Yes, it is a little difficult.”

“What is?”

“To imagine me among the tea-cups.”

Robert, unused to having his mind read—Aunt Lin was incapable of following anyone’s mental processes even when they were explained to her—was disconcerted. But she was not thinking of him.

“We had just begun to feel settled down, and at home, and safe, when this happened.”

For the first time since she had asked his help Robert felt the stirring of partisanship. “And all because a slip of a girl needs an alibi,” he said. “We must find out more about Betty Kane.”

“I can tell you one thing about her. She is over-sexed.”

“Is that just feminine intuition?”

“No. I am not very feminine and I have no intuition. But I have never known anyone—man or woman—with that colour of eye who wasn’t. That opaque dark blue, like a very faded navy—it’s infallible.”

Robert smiled at her indulgently. She was very feminine after all.

“And don’t feel superior because it happens not to be lawyers’ logic,” she added. “Have a look round at your own friends, and see.”

Before he could stop himself he thought of Gerald Blunt, the Milford scandal. Assuredly Gerald had slate-blue eyes. So had Arthur Wallis, the potman at The White Hart, who was paying three different monetary levies weekly. So had—Damn the woman, she had no right to make a silly generalisation like that and be right about it.

“It is fascinating to speculate on what she really did during that month,” Marion said.