appropriate to that air? I began, stupidly, to recall the names of such
flowers as bluebell, hare-bell, Canterbury-bell. In imagination I heard
their chime as the distant tinkling of a fairy musical-box.

Miss Tattersall, however, took no notice of my failure to find the ideal.
"Yes, isn't it?" she said, and then the horrible striking ceased, and we
heard little Nora Bailey across the Hall excitedly claiming that the clock
had struck thirteen.

"I counted most carefully," she was insisting.

"I can't think why that man doesn't come," Mrs. Sturton repeated in a
raised voice, as if she wanted to still the superstitious qualms that Miss
Bailey had started. "I told him to come round at a quarter to twelve, so
that there shouldn't be any mistake. It's very tiresome." She paused on
that and Jervaise was inspired to the statement that the fly came from the
Royal Oak, didn't it, a fact that Mrs. Sturton had already affirmed more
than once.

"What makes it rather embarrassing for the dear Jervaises," Miss
Tattersall confided to me, "is that the other things aren't ordered till
one--the Atkinsons' 'bus, you know, and the rest of 'em. Brenda persuaded
Mrs. Jervaise that we might go on for a bit after the vicar had gone."

I wished that I could get away from Miss Tattersall; she intruded on my
thoughts. I was trying to listen to a little piece that was unfolding in
my mind, a piece that began with the coming of the spirit of the
night-stock into this material atmosphere of heated, excited men and
women. I realised that invasion as the first effort of the wild romantic
night to enter the house; after that.... After that I only knew that the