gling scraped face, and if he had possessed enough hair on his
head, it would have been on end. As it was, when the lift stopped, he
retrieved his hat from the floor with a frank oath, and, as the witch
had at once rung the bell of Miss Ford's flat, he instinctively followed
her across that threshold.

She looked round in the hall, and said with a friendly smile: "I'm
afraid Harold gets a bit irritable sometimes. I often tell him to count
ten before he lets himself go, but he forgets. Did he hurt you?"

I am afraid the angry Mayor did not give Harold credit for much
initiative.

"Kissing is such a funny habit, isn't it," said the witch briskly as she
shook Miss Ford's hand. "I wonder who decided in the first place which
forms of contact should express which forms of emotion. I wonder----"

She interrupted herself as her eyes fell on some green sandwiches which
were occupying the third floor of a wicker Eiffel Tower beside Miss
Ford. "Oh how gorgeous," she said. "Do you know, I've only had two meals
in the last two days."

Nobody present had ever been obliged to miss a meal, so this statement
seemed to every one to be a message from another world.

"You must tell us about all your experiences, my dear Miss Watkins,"
said Miss Ford, leading the witch towards a chair by the fire. The witch
sat down suddenly cross-legged on the hearth-rug, leaving her rather
embarrassed hostess in the air, so to speak, towering rigidly above her.

"How d'you mean--experiences?" said the witch, after eating one sandwich
in silent ecstasy. "I was up in the sky last night, talking to a German.
Was that an experience?"

"The sky last night was surely no place for a lady," said Mr. Frere with
rather sour joviality.

"Oh, I know what she means," said Miss MacBee earnestly. "I was up in
the sky last night too----"

"Great Scott," exclaimed the witch. "But----"

"Yes, I was," persisted Miss MacBee. "I lay on the hammock which I have
had slung in my cellar, and shut my eyes, and loosed my spirit, and it
shot upward like a lark released. It detached itself from the common
trammels of the body, yes, my spirit, in shining armour, fought with the
false, cruel spirits of murderers."

"I hadn't got any shining armour," sighed the witch, who had been
looking a little puzzled. "But I had the hell of a wrangle with a Boche
witch who came over. We fought till we fell off our broomsticks, and
then she quoted the _Daily Mail_ at me, and then she f