he same
timeless hour, and had observed exactly the same phenomenon. Such late
hours, of course, amply accounted for these late breakfasts; but why, so
Miss Mapp pithily asked herself, why these late hours? Of course they
both kept summer-time, whereas most of Tilling utterly refused (except
when going by train) to alter their watches because Mr. Lloyd George
told them to; but even allowing for that ... then she perceived that
summer-time made it later than ever for its adherents, so that was no
excuse.

Miss Mapp had a mind that was incapable of believing the improbable, and
the current explanation of these late hours was very improbable, indeed.
Major Flint often told the world in general that he was revising his
diaries, and that the only uninterrupted time which he could find in
this pleasant whirl of life at Tilling was when he was alone in the
evening. Captain Puffin, on his part, confessed to a student's curiosity
about the ancient history of Tilling, with regard to which he was
preparing a monograph. He could talk, when permitted, by the hour about
the reclamation from the sea of the marsh land south of the town, and
about the old Roman road which was built on a raised causeway, of which
traces remained; but it argued, so thought Miss Mapp, an unprecedented
egoism on the part of Major Flint, and an equally unprecedented love of
antiquities on the part of Captain Puffin, that they should prosecute
their studies (with gas at the present price) till such hours. No; Miss
Mapp knew better than that, but she had not made up her mind exactly
what it was that she knew. She mentally rejected the idea that egoism
(even in these days of diaries and autobiographies) and antiquities
accounted for so much study, with the same healthy intolerance with
which a vigorous stomach rejects unwholesome food, and did not allow
herself to be insidiously poisoned by its retention. But as she took up
her light aluminium opera-glasses to make sure whether it was Isabel
Poppit or not who was now stepping with that high, prancing tread into
the stationer's in the High Street, she exclaimed to herself, for the
three hundred and sixty-fifth time after breakfast: "It's very
baffling"; for it was precisely a year to-day since she had first seen
those mysterious midnight squares of illuminated blind. "Baffling," in
fact, was a word that constantly made short appearances in Miss Mapp's
vocabulary, though its retention for a whole year over one su