Only from the policeman outside Highgate Station did she learn that she must either take the Tube back again to Camden Town or else walk across the Heath. Now Lady Tasker was seventy, and, with the exception of the Zoo, a place she visited from time to time with troops of turbulent great-nephews, the whole of North London was a sort of Camden Town to her, that is to say, she had no objection to its existence so long as it wasn't troublesome. It was half-past three when she said as much to the Highgate policeman, who up to that time had been an ordinary easy-going Conservative; by five-and-twenty minutes to four she had made of him a fuming Radical. He was saying something about South Square and Merton Lane. Lady Tasker addressed the bracing Highgate air in one of those expressionless and semi-ventriloquial asides that, especially in a mixed company, always made her ladyship very well worth sitting next to. "Merton Lane! Does the man suppose that conveys anything to me?.... I want to know how to get to Hampstead, not the names of the objects of interest on the way!" The newly-made Radical told her that there might be a taxi on the rank, and turned away to cuff the ears of an urchin who was tampering with an automatic machine. It was a wonder that Lady Tasker's glare, focussed through the gold-rimmed glass on a point between his shoulder-blades, did not burn a hole in his tunic. Taxis at eightpence a mile, indeed, with the house at Ludlow already full of those children of Churchill's, and three of Tony's little girls eating their way through the larder in Cromwell Gardens, and young Tommy, Emily's boy, who had just "pulled" his captaincy, arriving at Southampton in the "Seringapatam" on Saturday with another batch for her to take under her wing! Did people suppose she was made of money?... The policeman's tunic was just beginning to scorch when Lady Tasker, dropping the glass, turned away and set out for Hampstead on foot. She might very well have been excused had she omitted to return Mrs. Cosimo Pratt's call. Indeed she had vowed that very morning that nothing should drag her up to Hampstead that day. But for twenty times that Lady Tasker said "I will not," nineteen she repented and went, taking out the small change of her magnanimity when she got there. And after all, she would be killing two birds with one stone, for her niece Dorothy also lived somewhere in this northern Great Karroo, and unless she got these things over before the "Seringapatam" dropped anchor on Saturday there was no knowing when next she would have an hour to call her own. As she turned (after a brush with a second policeman, who summed her up quite wrongly on the strength of her antiquated pelisse and trailing old Victorian hat) down Merton Lane to the ponds, she told herself again that she was a foolish old woman to have come at all.