I hope Lavinia knows what she is doing.

'What is wrong with having him down?

'I don't know, but it seems to me to be taking risks with their luck.

'Luck?

'Everything has worked out the way they wanted it to, hasn't it? Walter saved from Marguerite Merriam and settling down to marry Liz; all family together in the old homestead and too cosy for words. No time to go introducing disconcertingly beautiful young men into the menage, it seems to me.

'Disconcerting, murmured Grant, wondering again what had disconcerted him about Searle. Mere good looks could not have been responsible. Policemen are not impressed by good looks.

'I wager that Emma takes one look at him and gets him out of the house directly after breakfast on Monday morning, Marta said. 'Her darling Liz is going to marry Walter, and nothing is going to stop that if Emma has anything to do with it.

'Liz Garrowby doesn't look very impressionable to me. I don't see why Mrs Garrowby should worry.

'Don't you indeed. That boy was making an impression on me in thirty seconds flat and a range of twenty yards, and I'm considered practically incombustible. Besides, I never believed that Liz really fell in love with that stick. She just wanted to bind up his broken heart.

'Was it badly broken?

'Considerably shaken, I should say. Naturally.

'Did you ever act with Marguerite Merriam?

'Oh, yes. More than once. We were together for quite a lengthy run in Walk in Darkness. There's a taxi coming.

'Taxi! What did you think of her?

'Marguerite? Oh, she was mad, of course.

'How mad?

'Ten tenths.

'In what way?

'You mean how did it take her? Oh, a complete indifference to everything but the thing she wanted at the moment.

That isn't madness; that is merely the criminal mind at its simplest.

'Well, you ought to know, my dear. Perhaps she was a criminal manque. What is quite certain is that she was as mad as a hatter and I wouldn't wish even Walter Whitmore a fate like being married to her.

'Why do you dislike the British Public's bright boy so much?

'My dear, I hate the way he yearns. It was bad enough when he was yearning over the thyme on an Aegean hillside with the bullets zipping past his ears-he never failed to let us hear the bullets: I always suspected that he did it by cracking a whip —

'Marta, you shock me.

'I don't, my dear; not one little bit. You know as well as I do. When we were all being shot at, Walter took care that he was safe in a nice fuggy office fifty feet underground. Then when it was once more unique to be in danger, up comes Walter from his little safe office and sits himself on a thymey hillside with a microphone and a whip to make bullet noises with.

'I see that I shall have to bail you out, one of these days.

'Homicide?

'No; criminal libel.

'Do you need bail for that? I thought it was one of those nice gentlemanly things that you are just summonsed for.

Grant thought how independable Malta's ignorances were.

'It might still be homicide, though, Marta said, in the cooing, considering voice that was her trade-mark on the stage. 'I could just stand the thyme and the bullets, but now that he has taken a ninety-nine years' lease of the spring corn, and the woodpeckers, and things, he amounts to a public menace.

'Why do you listen to him?

'Well, there's a dreadful fascination about it, you know. One thinks: Well, that's the absolute sky-limit of awfulness, than which nothing could be worse. And so next week you listen to see if it really can be worse. It's a snare. It's so awful that you can't even switch off. You wait fascinated for the next piece of awfulness, and the next. And you are still there when he signs off.

'It couldn't be, could it, Marta, that this is mere professional jealousy?

'Are you suggesting that the creature is a professional? asked Marta, dropping her voice a perfect fifth, so that it quivered with the reflection of repertory years, and provincial digs, and Sunday trains, and dreary auditions in cold dark theatres.

'No, I'm suggesting that he is an actor. A quite natural and unconscious actor, who has made himself a household word in a few years without doing any noticeable work to that end. I could forgive you for not liking that. What did Marguerite find so wonderful about him?

'I can tell you that. His devotion.