Miss Silver Deals With Death by Patricia Wentworth Page A

safety and disaster.
    Meade came back to No. 3, and made a neat parcel of the spencer, which she addressed to Mrs. Spooner in Sussex. Mrs. Underwood asked her why she was looking like skim milk, and lectured her for climbing the stairs when she might have taken the lift.
    “But I did take the lift, Aunt Mabel.”
    “Then what are you looking like that for? When are you seeing that young man of yours?”
    The skim-milk colour gave way to a momentary scarlet. Mrs. Underwood received a startling impression of fragility. Then the dark head was bent over the parcel.
    “He’ll be at the War Office all day. He’s going to ring me up as soon as he knows when he can get off.”
    Mrs. Underwood was dressed for the street. She pulled on a pair of gloves and said,
    “Here, I’ll take your parcel, and I’ll go and pack for you this afternoon. Get Ivy to make you some Ovaltine and have a lazy day. He’ll be wanting you to go out with him tonight as likely as not. I shan’t be back till half past seven.”
    It was a fearfully long day. Meade went into her room and lay down upon the bed. She couldn’t think, and she couldn’t feel. Everything was suspended, waiting for Giles. But this inability to think or feel was not rest, it was the extremity of strain. Thought did not function because it was stretched rigid between two opposite poles, the impossible and the actual. It wasn’t possible that Giles should be married to Carola Roland—Giles was married to Carola Roland. Only one of these things could be true. Yet there they were, the two of them, each making an impossibility of the other, and between them her own thought, in suspense.
    Across the landing, Elise Garside sat staring at the bare wall which faced her. Six months ago the wall had not been bare. A tall, slender walnut cabinet had stood against it with, on either side of it, one of her ribbon-back chairs. The whole effect had been delicately formal. Now the wall was bare. The cabinet with the Worcester china tea-service which had been one of her great-grandmother’s wedding presents had gone. The chairs had gone, not only the two but the whole set, and gone, as she most bitterly knew, at a tenth of what had been their value before all values had been lost in a dissolving world.
    The paper which covered the wall was, as Mrs. Smollett had said, a good deal faded. The imprint of the cabinet remained, blue upon a ground of silver-grey. The chair backs had left faint shadows. On Miss Garside’s right another patch of blue showed where the bureau had stood, whilst above the high mantelshelf several small blue ovals and a large rectangle proclaimed the departure of six miniatures and a mirror. The furnishings which remained were sparse and of no value—a threadbare carpet whose colours had gone down into a grey old age, a few chairs with chintz covers pale from much washing, a bookcase, a table, and Miss Garside.
    She sat quite still and faced the empty wall. She also faced an empty future. She was sixty years of age. She had no training and she had no money. She would not be able to pay the rent of her flat on quarter day, and she had nowhere to go. Her only living relations were an incredibly aged aunt, bedridden in a nursing home, two young serving soldiers in the Middle East, and a niece in Hong Kong. Until six months ago she had been quite comfortably off. Then the industrial concern from which she derived her income failed, and she had nothing left. All her eggs had been in the same basket. Now there was no basket and no eggs. There was no money at all. The diamond ring which she had failed to sell was in her hand. She turned it to and fro without looking at it, until her eyes were caught by a flash from the stone. She stared now at the ring, a fine solitaire diamond set in platinum. That was what it looked like, and that was what she had always believed it to be. But it wasn’t—it was a sham. Uncle James’ wedding present, and a sham. There hadn’t been any