“Daisy is priceless,” she said. “And what has Abfou told her?” “Well, it was very odd,” said Georgie. “The morning I got your letter Abfou wrote ‘L from L,’ and if that doesn’t mean ‘Letter from Lucia,’ I don’t know what else it could be.” “It might just as well mean ‘Lozengers from Leamington,’” said Lucia witheringly. “And what else?” Georgie felt the conversation was beginning to border rather dangerously on the Museum, and tried a light-hearted sortie into another subject. “Oh, just things of that sort,” he said. “And then she had a terrible time over her garden. She dismissed Simkinson for doing cross-word puzzles instead of the lawn, and determined to do it all herself. She sowed sprouts in that round bed under the dining-room window.” “No!” said Pepino, who was listening with qualms of home-sickness to these chronicles. “Yes, and the phlox in the kitchen garden,” said Georgie. He looked at Lucia, and became aware that her gimlet-eye was on him, and was afraid he had made the transition from Abfou to horticulture rather too eagerly. He went volubly on. “And she dug up all the seeds that Simkinson had planted, and pruned the roots of her mulberry tree and probably killed it,” he said. “Then in that warm weather last week, no, the week before, I got out my painting things again, and am doing a sketch of my house from the Green. Foljambe is very well, and, and....” he could think of nothing else except the Museum. Lucia waited till he had quite run down. “And what more did Abfou say?” she asked. “His message of ‘L from L’ would not have made you busy for very long.” Georgie had to reconsider the wisdom of silence. Lucia clearly suspected something, and when she came down for her week-end, and found the affairs of the Museum entirely engrossing the whole of Riseholme, his reticence, if he persisted in it, would wear a very suspicious aspect. “Oh yes, the Museum,” he said with feigned lightness. “Abfou told us to start a museum, and it’s getting on splendidly. That tithe-barn of Colonel Boucher’s. And Daisy’s given all the things she was going to make into a rockery, and I’m giving my Roman glass and two sketches, and Colonel Boucher his Samian ware and an ordnance map, and there are lots of fossils and some coins.” “And a committee?” asked Lucia. “Yes. Daisy and Mrs. Boucher and I, and we co-opted Robert,” he said with affected carelessness. Again some nameless pang shot through Lucia. Absent or present, she ought to have been the chairman of the committee and told them exactly what to do, and how to do it. But she felt no doubt that she could remedy all that when she came down to Riseholme for a week-end. In the meantime, it was sufficient to have pulled his secret out of Georgie, like a cork, with a loud pop, and an effusion of contents. “Most interesting,” she said. “I must think what I can give you for your museum. Well, that’s a nice little gossip.”