gun to get on Diva's nerves, and as
she lingered here a moment more a great idea occurred to her, which
temporarily banished the disappointment about the duellists. Elizabeth,
as all the world knew, had accumulated a great reservoir of provisions
in the false book-case in her garden-room, and Diva determined that, if
she could think of a neat phrase, the very next time Elizabeth said _au
reservoir_ to her, she would work in an allusion to Elizabeth's own
reservoir of corned beef, tongue, flour, bovril, dried apricots and
condensed milk. She would have to frame some stinging rejoinder which
would "escape her" when next Elizabeth used that stale old phrase: it
would have to be short, swift and spontaneous, and therefore required
careful thought. It would be good to bring "pop" into it also. "Your
reservoir in the garden-room hasn't gone 'pop' again, I hope, darling?"
was the first draft that occurred to her, but that was not sufficiently
condensed. "Pop goes the reservoir," on the analogy of the weasel, was
better. And, better than either, was there not some sort of corn called
pop-corn, which Americans ate?... "Have you any pop-corn in your
reservoir?" That would be a nasty one....

But it all required thinking over, and the sight of the Padre and the
duellists crossing the field below, as she still lingered on this
escarpment of the hill, brought the duel back to her mind. It would have
been considered inquisitive even at Tilling to put direct questions to
the combatants, and (still hoping for the best) ask them point-blank
"Who won?" or something of that sort; but until she arrived at some sort
of information, the excruciating pangs of curiosity that must be endured
could be likened only to some acute toothache of the mind with no
dentist to stop or remove the source of the trouble. Elizabeth had
already succumbed to these pangs of surmise and excitement, and had
frankly gone home to rest, and her absence, the fact that for the next
hour or two she could not, except by some extraordinary feat on the
telephone, get hold of anything which would throw light on the whole
prodigious situation, inflamed Diva's brain to the highest pitch of
inventiveness. She knew that she was Elizabeth's inferior in point of
reconstructive imagination, and the present moment, while the other was
recuperating her energies for fresh assaults on the unknown, was Diva's
opportunity. The one person who might be presumed to know more than
anybody