e turn
down to the dentist's and Mr. Wyse's. He had no errand to the Major's
house or to the Captain's. Then, oh then, he rang the bell at Miss
Mapp's back door. All the time Diva had been following him, keeping her
head well down so as to avert the possibility of observation from the
window of the garden-room, and walking so slowly that the motion of her
feet seemed not circular at all.... Then the bell was answered, and he
delivered into Withers' hands one, two tins of corned beef and a round
ox-tongue. He put the basket on his head and came down the street again,
shrilly whistling. If Diva had had any reasonably small change in her
pocket, she would assuredly have given him some small share in it.
Lacking this, she trundled home with all speed, and began cutting out
roses with swift and certain strokes of the nail-scissors.

Now she had already noticed that Elizabeth had paid visits to the
grocer's on three consecutive days (three consecutive days: think of
it!), and given that her purchases on other occasions had been on the
same substantial scale as to-day, it became a matter of thrilling
interest as to where she kept these stores. She could not keep them in
the coal cellar, for that was already bursting with coal, and Diva, who
had assisted her (the base one) in making a prodigious quantity of jam
that year from her well-stocked garden, was aware that the kitchen
cupboards were like to be as replete as the coal-cellar, before those
hoardings of dead oxen began. Then there was the big cupboard under the
stairs, but that could scarcely be the site of this prodigious cache,
for it was full of cardboard and curtains and carpets and all the
rubbishy accumulations which Elizabeth could not bear to part with. Then
she had large cupboards in her bedroom and spare rooms full to
overflowing of mouldy clothes, but there was positively not another
cupboard in the house that Diva knew of, and she crushed her temples in
her hands in the attempt to locate the hiding-place of the hoard.

Diva suddenly jumped up with a happy squeal of discovery, and in her
excitement snapped her scissors with so random a stroke that she
completely cut in half the bunch of roses that she was engaged on. There
was another cupboard, the best and biggest of all and the most secret
and the most discreet. It lay embedded in the wall of the garden-room,
cloaked and concealed behind the shelves a false book-case, which
contained no more than the simulacr