wee wifie's mind.

"Elizabeth suggested it herself," she squealed.

Naturally Diva could not help remembering that she had found Miss Mapp
and the Padre in earnest conversation together when she forced her way
in that morning with the news that the duellists had left by the 11.20
tram. Nobody could be expected to have so short a memory as to have
forgotten _that_. Just now she forgave Elizabeth for anything she had
ever done. That might have to be reconsidered afterwards, but at present
it was valid enough.

"Did she suggest it?" she asked.

The Padre behaved like a man, and lied like Ananias.

"Most emphatically she did not," he said.

The disappointment would have been severe, had the two ladies believed
this confident assertion, and Diva pictured a delightful interview with
Elizabeth, in which she would suddenly tell her the wild surmise the
Padre had made with regard to the cause of the duel, and see how she
looked then. Just see how she looked then: that was
all--self-consciousness and guilt would fly their colours....

* * * * *

Miss Mapp had been tempted when she went home that morning, after
enjoying the autumn tints, to ask Diva to lunch with her, but remembered
in time that she had told her cook to broach one of the tins of
corned-beef which no human wizard could coax into the store-cupboard
again, if he shut the door after it. Diva would have been sure to say
something acid and allusive, to remark on its excellence being happily
not wasted on the poor people in the hospital, or, if she had not said
anything at all about it, her silence as she ate a great deal would have
had a sharp flavour. But Miss Mapp would have liked, especially when she
went to take her rest afterwards on the big sofa in the garden-room, to
have had somebody to talk to, for her brain seethed with conjectures as
to what had happened, was happening and would happen, and discussion was
the best method of simplifying a problem, of narrowing it down to the
limits of probability, whereas when she was alone now with her own
imaginings, the most fantastic of them seemed plausible. She had,
however, handed a glorious suggestion to the Padre, the one, that is,
which concerned the cause of the duel, and it had been highly
satisfactory to observe the sympathy and respect with which he had
imbibed it. She had, too, been so discreet about it; she had not come
within measurable distance of asserting that the cha