happy in the next world,
what shall we do then?"

"Oh! yes He will," was her aunt's reply, uttered with such grimness
that Patricia, though only six years of age, had been satisfied that
not even God would dare to disappoint Aunt Adelaide.

Patricia had been a lonely child. She had come to distrust spontaneity
and, in consequence, became shy and self-conscious, with the inevitable
result that other children, the few who were in Aunt Adelaide's opinion
fit for her to associate with, made it obvious that she was one by
herself. Patricia had fallen back on her father's library, where she
had read many books that would have caused her aunt agonies of stormy
anguish, had she known.

Patricia early learnt the necessity for dissimulation. She always
carefully selected two books, one that she could ostensibly be reading
if her aunt happened to come into the library, and the other that she
herself wanted to read, and of which she knew her aunt would strongly
disapprove.

Miss Brent regarded boarding-schools as "hotbeds of vice," and in
consequence Patricia was educated at home, educated in a way that she
would never have been at any school; for Miss Brent was thorough in
everything she undertook. The one thing for which Patricia had to be
grateful to her aunt was her general knowledge, and the sane methods
adopted with her education. But for this she would not have been in
the position to accept a secretaryship to a politician.

When Patricia was twenty-one her father had died, and she inherited
from her mother an annuity of a hundred pounds a year. Her aunt had
suggested that they should live together; but Patricia had announced
her intention of working, and with the money that she realised from the
sale of her father's effects, particularly his library, she came to
London and underwent a course of training in shorthand, typewriting,
and general secretarial work. This was in March, 1914. Before she was
ready to undertake a post, the war broke out upon Europe like a
cataclysm, and a few months later Patricia had obtained a post as
private secretary to Mr. Arthur Bonsor, M.P.

Mr. Bonsor was the victim of marriage. Destiny had ordained that he
should spend his life in golf and gardening, or in breeding earless
rabbits and stingless bees. He was bucolic and passive. Mrs. Bonsor,
however, after a slight altercation with Destiny, had decided that Mr.
Bonsor was to become a rising politician. Thus it came about th