The Tall House Mystery (Musaicum Murder Mysteries). Dorothy Fielding

you're doing."

      "I'm not! Lawrence Gilmour would love me if I only could show him—"

      "You've shown him sufficiently, and everyone else too. Come, Winnie, pull yourself together. Have some pride. Haliburton wants to marry you. But if you keep this sort of thing up he won't feel like that much longer. You ought to show Lawrence Gilmour that though he may not care for you, others do." Mrs. Pratt's tactics were too transparent to succeed, Moy feared. He himself at the moment was no more conscious of the impropriety of listening than if he had been at a theater.

      "But I like Charles Ingram better." Miss Pratt sounded as though she was smiling again. "And he too wants to marry me."

      Moy had taken a step sideways and could now see into the room. Mrs. Pratt's face startled him. She stood looking down on the bent head of Winnie as the girl fiddled with something on the mantel as though she could burst out into a perfect flame of violence—vituperation—despair—pleading&mdash ;but by an effort that was patently all but beyond her, she bit her lip in silence and led the way out through a farther door.

      Two mornings later, Alfreda told Gilmour that she would not be able to go with him to a dog show as they had planned, or rather as he had planned for her.

      "I've got so much fitting-out to do," she said with one of her unfriendly smiles, "and shan't be visible until one o'clock today." She seemed to have an early morning appointment, for it was only half-past eight when she left the house. She took some care to see that she was not followed, rather an odd idea one would have said, but she saw no one, and tests such as jumping on to a bus at the last moment and off when all but started, which reduced two conductors to close on apoplexy, assured her that no one had any interest in her movements. That ascertained, she made for a tube which landed her at Hammersmith Broadway. Here she turned into a street that was once lived in by city men who wanted the country. At a house with a black door and orange-painted pillars, she ran up the steps, inserted a latch-key with which she did not seem at all familiar, and finally let herself into a hall. A woman in a rather elaborate frock for the morning came forward with a mixture of graciousness and condescension.

      "Miss Gray, isn't it? Your room's all ready for you. But wouldn't you like to write in the lounge? As I told you yesterday afternoon when you took the room, no one will disturb you there, only Mrs. Findlay ever uses it at this hour, and you'll find it warm and cosy. Better than being in the basement, don't you think?"

      "Thanks awfully, I'll try it," Alfreda said brightly. And in a corner of a glassed-in lounge she ensconced herself, writing-pad on knee. But she did not write much. Her dark eyes flashed to and fro about the main corridor which showed through the side of the lounge. Presently the manageress entered with a big stout woman of middle age, who wore a sort of mantilla of black lace on her head fastened to her white hair in front with a large silver star and floating below her waist at the back. Two corkscrew ringlets dangled over each ear.

      "This is Miss Gray." The manageress steered the older woman to the newcomer's corner. "She's interested in disarmament too, Mrs. Findlay, so I thought you and she would be congenial spirits." And the manageress left them.

      "Oh, do you care too?" Alfreda asked eagerly, scanning the woman in front of her closely. "I didn't know anyone cared—really. Anyone but myself and the man I'm engaged to, Lawrence Gilmour."

      "Lots of people care," Mrs. Findlay answered a trifle coldly. She had rather a forbidding eye and jaw. The woman was one of those people who are often pitied for being solitary, but who are that by choice. True, she had outlived all her family, and was practically alone in the world, but had she had a host of relations the result would have been the same. Now, after a few moments' silence, she made as if to go out again, but Alfreda sprang up.

      "Don't go!" she said appealingly. "I'm so frightfully pleased to have met someone who can tell me about what we women can do. The idea of all these war preparations is awful. Surely, if we band together, we can be of some use."

      Mrs. Findlay was conquered for the moment. This was her hobby, or rather it was more than that. It was the window through which her soul drew in a little air and light and so managed to exist in the desert that she had made of the rest of her life. At first reluctantly, then more freely, she let Alfreda draw her out on the subject. Alfreda, for her part listened as though to a Sibyl.

      "Oh, I would like to join!" she breathed, when Mrs. Findlay mentioned the Women's Peace Movement, of which she was an honorary secretary. "So would Lawrence—Mr. Gilmour. I think you must have seen him at some of the meetings—" and she described Gilmour. Mrs. Findlay looked a trifle impatient. She said that she had not seen any young man at any of their meetings. Something quivered across Alfreda's face and was gone, but whether she wanted to hear an affirmative, or the negative that had been forthcoming, it was difficult to say.

      At ten she put her papers together. "I write, you know," she murmured. "Just little things of no account. But I might be able to get in some article which would help."

      This time it was Mrs. Findlay who looked eager and, on hearing that Alfreda expected to be in the lounge on the following morning at the same hour, said that she would like to continue their talk. Alfreda put her blank paper away in the little basement room that she had taken late yesterday afternoon and hurried to the door. But the manageress stopped her.

      "I saw you having quite a nice chat," she said pleasantly, "and to no one else does Mrs. Findlay ever open her mouth. I told her it would be a change for her to meet someone who shared her interests. Generally she just sits there while her room is being aired, and we daren't talk to her."

      Alfreda nodded and hurried off, her face a mixture of emotions; she jumped on a bus that would take her close to The Tall House, satisfaction and dissatisfaction were to be read in her quick, dark eyes. But at nine on the following day she was in the lounge again, and again she and Mrs. Findlay talked of peace, and of how to stop the preparations for war that were darkening all the world.

      The next morning after that Mrs. Findlay referred to some books she had in her room, and Alfreda seemed so keen on seeing them that, after a second's hesitation, she asked the younger woman in to a large dreary bed-sitting-room as it is called. The books in question were stacked on a table, and Alfreda promptly took off the top one.

      "May I take this home and read it?" she begged. "I'll bring it back tomorrow morning."

      "Tomorrow a friend is coming to see me about this time," Mrs. Findlay quid in her stiff way. "As a matter of fact he too has just read that book."

      "Can't I run in and hand it to you?" Alfreda asked, her face all innocence.

      "I'm afraid my friend is elderly, and has so few minutes to spare, and counts too much on finding me alone," Mrs. Findlay said coldly, and she remained very cool for the rest of the time that Alfreda as usual spent with her, and when the girl left with the book, rather earlier than usual, Mrs. Findlay stopped for a word with the manageress in the hall.

      "That Miss Gray who's just come seems rather a pushing young person," was her remark. "I'm afraid she'd be quite a nuisance if I weren't leaving next week. Please don't let her know I'm going; she's quite capable of asking herself down to my cottage in the country."

      "I wouldn't breathe a word about your going," the manageress assured her. Mrs. Findlay had the largest room in the house, had taken it at a time when rents were at their highest, and, therefore, paid nearly double what it would now bring. Besides, she was leaving, she had just had an unexpected windfall, and the manageress hoped that some parting present might brighten her own none too gay lot.

      "How did she come to speak to you about me in the first place?" Mrs. Findlay asked.

      "She came in just after you the other afternoon. She was looking for a room, and after she had taken hers, we stood a moment chatting, and she said she thought she had seen you at Spiritualistic stances near here. I told her I didn't think that at all likely."

      "Preposterous!" chimed in Mrs. Findlay.

      "She said something about the star you wear, and I told her that was the Star of Peace, and that you were tremendously keen on there being no more wars, and disarmament and so on...She hardly let me