id Miss Mapp aloud, and, though the telephone bell was
ringing, and the postulant might be one of the servants' friends ringing
them up at an hour when their mistress was usually in the High Street,
she glided swiftly to the large cupboard underneath the stairs which was
full of the things which no right-minded person could bear to throw
away: broken basket-chairs, pieces of brown paper, cardboard boxes
without lids, and cardboard lids without boxes, old bags with holes in
them, keys without locks and locks without keys and worn chintz covers.
There was one--it had once adorned the sofa in the garden-room--covered
with red poppies (very easy to cut out), and Miss Mapp dragged it
dustily from its corner, setting in motion a perfect cascade of
cardboard lids and some door-handles.

Withers had answered the telephone, and came to announce that Twemlow
the grocer regretted he had only two large tins of corned beef, but----

"Then say I will have the tongue as well, Withers," said Miss Mapp.
"Just a tongue--and then I shall want you and Mary to do some cutting
out for me."

The three went to work with feverish energy, for Diva had got a start,
and by four o'clock that afternoon there were enough poppies cut out to
furnish, when in seed, a whole street of opium dens. The dress selected
for decoration was, apart from a few mildew-spots, the colour of ripe
corn, which was superbly appropriate for September. "Poppies in the
corn," said Miss Mapp over and over to herself, remembering some sweet
verses she had once read by Bernard Shaw or Clement Shorter or somebody
like that about a garden of sleep somewhere in Norfolk....

"No one can work as neatly as you, Withers," she said gaily, "and I
shall ask you to do the most difficult part. I want you to sew my lovely
poppies over the collar and facings of the jacket, just spacing them a
little and making a dainty irregularity. And then Mary--won't you,
Mary?--will do the same with the waistband while I put a border of them
round the skirt, and my dear old dress will look quite new and lovely. I
shall be at home to nobody, Withers, this afternoon, even if the Prince
of Wales came and sat on my doorstep again. We'll all work together in
the garden, shall we, and you and Mary must scold me if you think I'm
not working hard enough. It will be delicious in the garden."

Thanks to this pleasant plan, there was not much opportunity for Withers
and Mary to be idle....

* *