This was intensely
gratifying: it indicated that her influence was at work in him, for in
response to her wish, so often and so tactfully urged on him, that he
would go to bed earlier and not work so hard at night, here was the
darkened window, and she dismissed as unworthy the suspicion which had
been aroused by the red-currant fool. The window of his bedroom was
dark too: he must have already put out his light, and Miss Mapp made
haste over her little tidyings so that she might not be found a
transgressor to her own precepts. But there was a light in Captain
Puffin's house: he had a less impressionable nature than the Major and
was in so many ways far inferior. And did he really find Roman roads so
wonderfully exhilarating? Miss Mapp sincerely hoped that he did, and
that it was nothing else of less pure and innocent allurement that kept
him up.... As she closed the window very gently, it did just seem to her
that there had been something equally baffling in Major Flint's
egoistical vigils over his diaries; that she had wondered whether there
was not something else (she had hardly formulated what) which kept his
lights burning so late. But she would now cross him--dear man--and his
late habits, out of the list of riddles about Tilling which awaited
solution. Whatever it had been (diaries or what not) that used to keep
him up, he had broken the habit now, whereas Captain Puffin had not. She
took her poppy-bordered skirt over her arm, and smiled her thankful way
to bed. She could allow herself to wonder with a little more
definiteness, now that the Major's lights were out and he was abed, what
it could be which rendered Captain Puffin so oblivious to the passage of
time, when he was investigating Roman roads. How glad she was that the
Major was not with him.... "Benjamin Flint!" she said to herself as,
having put her window open, she trod softly (so as not to disturb the
slumberer next door) across her room on her fat white feet to her big
white bed. "Good-night, Major Benjy," she whispered, as she put her
light out.

* * * * *

It was not to be supposed that Diva would act on Miss Mapp's alarming
hints that morning as to the fate of coal-hoarders, and give, say, a
ton of fuel to the hospital at once, in lieu of her usual smaller
Christmas contribution, without making further inquiries in the proper
quarters as to the legal liabilities of having, so she ascertained,
three tons in her cel