ties was rather easily flustered, ran
out of the dangerous room in Audrey's wake. They met Mr. Mathew Moze at
the half-landing of the stairs.

He was a man of average size, somewhat past sixty years. He had plump
cheeks, tinged with red; his hair, moustache and short, full beard, were
quite grey. He wore a thick wide-spreading ulster, and between his coat and
waistcoat a leather vest, and on his head a grey cap. Put him in the Strand
in town clothes, and he might have been taken for a clerk, a civil servant,
a club secretary, a retired military officer, a poet, an undertaker--for
anything except the last of a long line of immovable squires who could not
possibly conceive what it was not to be the owner of land. His face was
preoccupied and overcast, but as soon as he realised that Miss Ingate was
on the stairs it instantly brightened into a warm and rather wistful smile.

"Good morning, Miss Ingate," he greeted her with deferential cordiality.
"I'm so glad to see you back."

"Good morning, good morning, Mr. Moze," responded Miss Ingate. "Vehy nice
of you. Vehy nice of you."

Nobody would have guessed from their demeanour that they differed on every
subject except their loyalty to that particular corner of Essex, that he
regarded her and her political associates as deadly microbes in the
national organism, and that she regarded him as a nincompoop crossed with a
tyrant. Each of them had a magic glass to see in the other nothing but a
local Effendi and familiar guardian angel of Moze. Moreover, Mr. Moze's
public smile and public manner were irresistible--until he lost his temper.
He might have had friends by the score, had it not been for his deep
constitutional reserve--due partly to diffidence and partly to an immense
hidden conceit. Mr. Moze's existence was actuated, though he knew it not,
by the conviction that the historic traditions of England were committed to
his keeping. Hence the conceit, which was that of a soul secretly
self-dedicated.

Audrey, outraged by the hateful hypocrisy of persons over fifty, and
terribly constrained and alarmed, turned vaguely back up the stairs. Miss
Ingate, not quite knowing what she did, with an equal vagueness followed
her.

"Come in. Do come in," urged Mr. Moze at the door of the study.

Audrey, who remained on the landing, heard her elders talk smoothly of
grave Mozian things, while Mr. Moze unlocked the new tin box above the
safe.

"I'd forgotten a most important paper