tastes, however, in Viner's opinion were somewhat, if not decidedly,
limited. Brought up in her youth on Miss Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Mrs.
Henry Wood, Miss Penkridge had become a confirmed slave to the
sensational. She had no taste for the psychological, and nothing but
scorn for the erotic. What she loved was a story which began with crime
and ended with a detection--a story which kept you wondering who did it,
how it was done, and when the doing was going to be laid bare to the
light of day. Nothing pleased her better than to go to bed with a brain
titivated with the mysteries of the last three chapters; nothing gave her
such infinite delight as to find, when the final pages were turned, that
all her own theories were wrong, and that the real criminal was somebody
quite other than the person she had fancied. For a novelist who was so
little master of his trade as to let you see when and how things were
going, Miss Penkridge had little but good-natured pity; for one who led
you by all sorts of devious tracks to a startling and surprising
sensation she cherished a whole-souled love; but for the creator of a
plot who could keep his secret alive and burning to his last few
sentences she felt the deepest thing that she could give to any human
being--respect. Such a master was entered permanently on her mental
library list.

At precisely ten o'clock that evening Viner read the last page of a novel
which had proved to be exactly suited to his aunt's tastes. A dead
silence fell on the room, broken only by the crackling of the logs in the
grate. Miss Penkridge dropped her knitting on her silk-gowned knees and
stared at the leaping flames; her nephew, with an odd glance at her, rose
from his easy-chair, picked up a pipe and began to fill it from a
tobacco-jar on the mantelpiece. The clock had ticked several times before
Miss Penkridge spoke.