In another minute Aguilar, gloomy and unbending, had received the keys of
Flank Hall, and the procession crunched down the drive on its way to the
station.



CHAPTER VII

THE CIGARETTE GIRL


Audrey did not deem that she had begun truly to live until the next
morning, when they left London, after having passed a night in the Charing
Cross Hotel. During several visits to London in the course of the summer
Audrey had learnt something about the valuelessness of money in a
metropolis chiefly inhabited by people who were positively embarrassed by
their riches. She knew, for example, that money being very plentiful and
stylish hats very rare, large quantities of money had to be given for
infinitesimal quantities of hats. The big and glittering shops were full of
people whose pockets bulged with money which they were obviously anxious to
part with in order to obtain goods, while the proud shop-assistants, secure
in the knowledge that money was naught and goods were everything, did their
utmost, by hauteur and steely negatives, to render any transaction
possible. It was the result of a mysterious "Law of Exchange." She was
aware of this. She had lost her childhood's naive illusions about the
sovereignty of money.

Nevertheless she received one or two shocks on the journey, which was
planned upon the most luxurious scale that the imagination of Messrs.