“Because--well, me and Cook got to talking last night about poor Miss Lambe, and--I can’t say it how I mean,” Emma rambled on confusedly, “but Cook would have it that people as go off their heads--well, they _are_ off their heads. They don’t look at anything like we do any more--it’s sort of all upside down to them. But I didn’t think it was like that--well, at any rate not with Miss Lambe.” “Why not?” said Nurse Alberta. She looked interested and Emma was encouraged. “I thought, perhaps,” she said timidly, “that the inside of her poor mind is still like everybody’s else’s, in a way, only she can’t get the thoughts to come out right. And I thought, perhaps, that when she said all that about them wanting to poison her, it was only her--her mad sort of way of saying that she’d felt, all along, they really wanted her to go away. And that would be why she said I was the only person that she was safe with. Because I never did want her to go away. The master and mistress and the young ladies may have felt like that. Of course, it’s been ever so trying for them, I know, having her here like that--and the girls downstairs, they wanted her to go. But I never did, and I wondered if perhaps that was what she sort of felt, only she couldn’t explain it right, and so it came out that way--in all her talk about being poisoned, and that.” Emma stopped and looked rather wistfully at the nurse. “You’ll think I’m balmy myself, talking like that. And I can’t explain what I mean a bit well. It’s not as if I’d been educated like you----” “Oh, I don’t know,” said Nurse Alberta, smiling. “I think I understand what you mean, Emma. According to your notion, the poor old lady feels and thinks pretty much the same as we do, but she’s lost the trick of communicating her feelings and her thoughts. They--they get lost in transmission, so to say.” “You do put it well, Nurse!” said Emma admiringly. Nurse Alberta looked gratified. “I don’t know,” she said modestly. But she was herself rather pleased by the sound of the phrase that she had used, and could not resist repeating it. “It’s a bit far-fetched, perhaps, but there’s certainly something in what you say, Emma,” she observed, biting off another thread. “Lost in transmission--that’s the idea--lost in transmission!” TIME WORKS WONDERS TIME WORKS WONDERS I “You funny little thing!” he said patronisingly. Adela resented the term violently, but because he was the only man who had ever attempted to talk personalities with her, she accepted it smilingly. “I must read some of those books of yours. Tell me what the names are.” “Oh, it doesn’t matter! Never mind about my books,” she said hurriedly. Adela could not imagine Willoughby reading anybody’s books, unless definitely of that class which deals with a fictitious Secret Service or the intrigues of an imaginary kingdom.