penal servitude for killing a baby or something--you said she robbed him
and justified her stealing because the story of the unjust steward was
in the Bible! How we laughed over that! She's just the same too, gliding
about all over the house and turning up when least expected."

Other reminiscences filled the next two sides of the letter, and ran,
without a trace of punctuation, into instructions about a Salamander
stove for heating my work-room in the flat; these were followed by
things I was to tell the cook, and by requests for several articles she
had forgotten and would like sent after her, two of them blouses, with
descriptions so lengthy and contradictory that I sighed as I read them--
"unless you come down soon, in which case perhaps you wouldn't mind
bringing them; not the mauve one I wear in the evening sometimes, but
the pale blue one with lace round the collar and the crinkly front.
They're in the cupboard--or the drawer, I'm not sure which--of my
bedroom. Ask Annie if you're in doubt. Thanks most awfully. Send a
telegram, remember, and we'll meet you in the motor any time. I don't
quite know if I shall stay the whole month--alone. It all depends...."
And she closed the letter, the italicized words increasing recklessly
towards the end, with a repetition that Mabel would love to have me "for
myself," as also to have a "man in the house," and that I only had to
telegraph the day and the train.... This letter, coming by the second
post, interrupted me in a moment of absorbing work, and, having read it
through to make sure there was nothing requiring instant attention, I
threw it aside and went on with my notes and reading. Within five
minutes, however, it was back at me again. That restless thing called
"between the lines" fluttered about my mind. My interest in the Balkan
States--political article that had been "ordered"--faded. Somewhere,
somehow I felt disquieted, disturbed. At first I persisted in my work,
forcing myself to concentrate, but soon found that a layer of new