Mumma was at her usual post of observation, beside him, and no doubt she had said, “There’s the rectory pony cart coming towards you, dear--I should sound the horn, if I were you.” But perhaps she said it too soon, or repeated it so often that poor Puppa’s senses became rather dazed and he ceased to take in the meaning of the words. At all events, he appeared to drive the car deliberately, and very, very slowly, straight at Lady Annabel. But she never flinched at all, even when the gardener’s boy almost--but not quite--drove her into the gutter in order to avoid a collision. And when she subsequently mentioned the incident to Mary Ambrey, Lady Annabel said that she did not wish any official notice to be taken of it. Her manner distinctly gave Mary the impression that General Kendal had narrowly escaped excommunication at the hands of the Rector. _Chapter Six_ Mrs. Harter did not come to discuss the play with the others that afternoon, but Captain Patch went straight from the meeting to the house in Queen Street and told her about it, and made her promise to sing the “Bulbul Ameer” song. Again I shall have to fall back upon what, in reality, can only be guess-work, based upon what was afterward told me by Mary Ambrey. It was their second meeting, and it clinched matters, so far as Bill Patch was concerned. Mrs. Harter may have known, too--probably she did--but she held complexities in her nature that would make her surrender a less simple and less instantaneous affair than his. I can imagine that, realizing as she certainly did, the strength of the extraordinary thing that was coming, inevitably, to overwhelm them both, she may have hesitated for a moment--not from doubt or fear, but simply in order to gauge, in one breathless instant, the smashing force of the storm before it should break. He went to see her, and they walked out of the narrow Queen Street house and up Loman Hill to the crossroads there. She told him about her life. I have put together what I heard in the time, later on, when we were all talking about her, and the little that she said to Mary in their one interview, and the facts that afterward Nancy Fazackerly gave me. And, knowing her turns of phraseology, which remained characteristic of her class and of the defiant streak that ran all through her, I have made out my own version of what she said. She had been an ambitious girl. Cross Loman had not liked her and she had not liked Cross Loman. Although she was not beautiful, she possessed very powerful sex magnetism and had love affairs from her schooldays onward. But the hard, practical vein that had come to her direct from Ellison, the successful tradesman, never failed her. She never lost her head. She despised her country-town lovers, even while she flaunted their admiration in the face of all Cross Loman.