front
of an irritatingly dull fire banked up with slack, and nursed his
damaged hand and meditated on his future plans.

His plans were still exactly in the state in which they had been when
Sir Isaac parted from him at the gate of Black Strand. They remained in
the same state for two whole days. Throughout all that distressing
period his general intention of some magnificent intervention on behalf
of Lady Harman remained unchanged, it produced a number of moving
visions of flights at incredible speeds in (recklessly hired) motor-cars
of colossal power,--most of the purchase money for Black Strand was
still uninvested at his bank--of impassioned interviews with various
people, of a divorce court with a hardened judge congratulating the
manifestly quite formal co-respondent on the moral beauty of his
behaviour, but it evolved no sort of concrete practicable detail upon
which any kind of action might be taken. And during this period of
indecision Mr. Brumley was hunted through London by a feverish unrest.
When he was in his little flat in Pont Street he was urged to go to his
club, when he got to his club he was urged to go anywhere else, he
called on the most improbable people and as soon as possible fled forth
again, he even went to the British Museum and ordered out a lot of books
on matrimonial law. Long before that great machine had disgorged them
for him he absconded and this neglected, this widowed pile of volumes
still standing to his account only came back to his mind in the middle
of the night suddenly and disturbingly while he was trying to remember
the exact words he had used in his brief conversation with Lady
Harman....

Sec.9

Two days after Mr. Brumley's visit Susan Burnet reached Black Strand.
She too had been baffled for a while. For some week or more she couldn't
discover the whereabouts of Lady Harman and lived in the profoundest
perplexity. She had brought back her curtains to the Putney house in a
large but luggable bundle, they were all made and ready to put up, and
she found the place closed and locked, in the charge of a caretaker
whose primary duty it was to answer no questions. It needed several days
of thought and amazement, and a vast amount of "I wonder," and "I just
would like to know," before it occurred to Susan that if she wrote to
Lady Harman at the Putney address the letter might be forwarded. And
even then she almost wrecked the entire enterprise by mentioning the
money, and it w