No! It must have been the comment that flashed through my own mind, and that I imagined spoken aloud as the burly policeman whose back I had been studying during this interlude dropped his hand and allowed our taxi to whizz forward into the writhing tangle of traffic.

There was no further stopping or talking until at last we reached the imposing entrance of the Near Oriental Shipping Agency offices.

I noticed that the Governor’s level eyebrows rose a trifle as he looked at the indicator of the fares before paying the driver. Yes, I am sure that many fifteen shillings’ worth of taxi-drive haven’t seemed as long. I only hope this[66] florin’s worth was as endless to him as it was to me!

[66]

Then, just as I was turning away, my employer surprised me by saying brusquely but quite nicely, “Miss Trant, you must do just as you like in the matter of—of which we’ve been speaking. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I am sorry if I did—You understand that?”

“Oh, of course,” I said, all meekness again.

And then I set my teeth before I ran up the stairs into the typists’ dressing-room and prepared to face the eyes of my three friends, Miss Robinson, Miss Holt and Miss Smith.

[67]

[67]

CHAPTER VI WHAT THEY SAID

WHAT THEY SAID

In the dressing-room, where Miss Robinson was rinsing out the sooty basin before washing her hands in it, Miss Holt “smarming” her hair-net down over her little brown chocolate of a head, and Miss Smith tearing yet another leaf out of the inevitable book of papiers poudrés, the silence that met me was quite as death-like as if the girls had just been pulled up by Mr. Dundonald’s “Talk-ing, ladies!”

Talking? I didn’t need to be told that, from the moment they’d seen, out of the landing window, the last of that taxi in which the Governor and his private clerk had driven off, to the moment they had heard my returning footstep on the stairs, they 

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