questions, one by one, from his crafty little list, pursing his lips between each; and one by one, Lawford, seated at the dressing-table, fluently scribbled his answers. Then question and answer were rigorously compared by Mr Bethany, with small white head bent close and spectacles poised upon the powerful nose, and signed and dated, and passed to Mrs Lawford without a word. 

 Mrs Lawford read question and answer where she stood, in complete silence. She looked up. ‘Many of these questions I don’t know the answers to myself,’ she said. 

 ‘It is immaterial,’ said Mr Bethany. 

 ‘One answer is—is inaccurate. ‘Yes, yes, quite so: due to a mistake in a letter from myself.’ 

 Mrs Lawford read quietly on, folded the papers, and held them out between finger and thumb. ‘The—handwriting...’ she remarked very softly. 

 ‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ said Mr Bethany warmly; ‘all the general look and run of the thing different, but every real essential feature unchanged. Now into the envelope. And now a little wax?’ 

 Mrs Lawford stood waiting. ‘There’s a green piece of sealing-wax,’ almost drawled the quiet voice, ‘in the top right drawer of the nest in the study, which old James gave me the Christmas before last.’ He glanced with lowered eyelids at his wife’s flushed cheek. Their eyes met. 

 ‘Thank you,’ she said. 

 When she returned the vicar was sitting in a chair, leaning his chin on the knobbed handle of his umbrella. He rose and lit a taper for her with a match from a little green pot on the table. And Mrs Lawford, with trembling fingers, sealed the letter, as he directed, with his own seal. 

 ‘There!’ he said triumphantly, ‘how many more such brilliant lawyers, I wonder, lie dormant in the Church? And who shall keep this?... Why, all three, of course.’ He went on without pausing. ‘Some little drawer now, secret and undetectable, with a lock.’ Just such a little drawer that locked itself with a spring lay by chance in the looking-glass. There the letter was hidden. And Mr Bethany looked at his watch. ‘Nineteen minutes,’ he said. ‘The next thing, my dear child—we’re getting on swimmingly—and it’s astonishing how things are simplified by mere use—the next thing is to send for Simon.’ 

 Sheila took a deep breath, but did not look up. ‘I am entirely in your hands,’ she replied. 

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