"Then you shouldn't have sworn," retorted Audrey. "But I'm glad you did
swear, because I had to tell somebody, and there was nobody but you."

Miss Ingate might possibly have contrived to employ some of that sagacity
in which she took a secret pride upon a very critical and urgent situation,
had not Mrs. Moze, with a white handkerchief wrapped round her forehead,
at that moment come into the room. Immediately the study was full of
neuralgia and eau-de-Cologne.

When Mrs. Moze and Miss Ingate at length recovered from the tenderness of
meeting each other after a separation of ten days or more, Audrey had
vanished like an illusion. She was not afraid of her mother; and she could
trust Miss Ingate, though Miss Ingate and Mrs. Moze were dangerously
intimate; but she was too self-conscious to remain in the presence of her
fellow-creatures; and in spite of her faith in Miss Ingate she thought of
the spinster as of a vase filled now with a fatal liquor which by any
accident might spill and spread ruin--so that she could scarcely bear to
look upon Miss Ingate.

At the back of the house a young Pomeranian dog, which had recently solaced
Miss Ingate in the loss of a Pekingese done to death by a spinster's
too-nourishing love, was prancing on his four springs round the chained
yard-dog, his friend and patron. In a series of marvellous short bounds, he
followed Audrey with yapping eagerness down the slope of the garden; and
the yard-dog, aware that none but the omnipotent deity, Mr. Moze, sole
source of good and evil, had the right to loose him, turned round once and
laid himself flat and long on the ground, sighing.

The garden, after developing into an orchard and deteriorating into a
scraggy plantation, ended in a low wall that was at about the level of the