keep from her the news of
any local quarrel, love-affair, or money trouble--somehow or other she
always found out everything she was likely to want to know--and she
almost always wanted to know everything.

There was another fact about Miss Pendarth, and one which much
contributed to her importance even with the people who disliked and
feared her: she was the only inhabitant of the remote Surrey village who
was in touch with the world of fashion and society--who knew people whose
"pictures are in the papers." Now and again, though more and more rarely
as time went on, she would leave Rose Cottage to take part in some big
family gathering of the important and prosperous clan to which, in spite
of her own lack of means, she yet belonged, and with whom she kept in
touch. But she herself never entertained a visitor at Rose Cottage, for
a reason of which she herself was painfully aware and which the more
careless of those about her did not in the least realise. This reason was
that she was very, very poor. Before the War, her little settled income
had enabled her to live in comfort in a house which was her own. But now,
had not her one servant been friend as well as maid, she could not have
gone on living in Rose Cottage; and during the last year, as Betty
Tosswill perhaps alone had noticed, certain beautiful things, fine bits
of good old silver, delicate inlaid pieces of furniture, and a pair of
finely carved gilt mirrors, had disappeared from Rose Cottage.

The house was situated in the village street, with, however, a paved
forecourt, in which stood two huge Italian oil jars gay from April to
November with narcissi, tulips, or pink geraniums. Miss Pendarth was
proud of the fine old Sussex ironwork gate and railing which separated
her domain from the village street. The gate was exactly opposite the
entrance to the churchyard, while at right angles stood the village post
office. From the windows of her drawing-room upstairs, the mistress of
Rose Cottage was able to see a great deal that went on in the village of
Beechfield.

Miss Pendarth's appearance, as is so often the case with an elderly,
unmarried Englishwoman of her class, gave no clue to her clever,
decisive, and original character. She had a thin, rather long mouth, what
old-fashioned people call a good nose, and grey eyes, and she had kept
the slight, rather stiff, figure of her girlhood. She still wore her
hair, which was only now beginning to turn really grey