She pushed me into a chair, and, sitting on the arm of it, laid her hand on mine and became of a sudden wondrously business-like. 'Listen,' she said, 'I'll tell you what we have arranged.' It was borne in upon me, as she began to do so, that she appeared from the very beginning to have been extremely confident that that essential part of her plans, my consent to the scheme, could be relied upon as something of a certainty. Women have these intuitions. III Looking back, I think I can fix the point at which this insane venture I had undertaken ceased to be a distorted dream, from which I vaguely hoped that I might shortly waken, and took shape as a reality of the immediate future. That moment came when I met Mr Arnold Abney by appointment at his club. Till then the whole enterprise had been visionary. I gathered from Cynthia that the boy Ogden was shortly to be sent to a preparatory school, and that I was to insinuate myself into this school and, watching my opportunity, to remove him; but it seemed to me that the obstacles to this comparatively lucid scheme were insuperable. In the first place, how were we to discover which of England's million preparatory schools Mr Ford, or Mr Mennick for him, would choose? Secondly, the plot which was to carry me triumphantly into this school when--or if--found, struck me as extremely thin. I was to pose, Cynthia told me, as a young man of private means, anxious to learn the business, with a view to setting up a school of his own. The objection to that was, I held, that I obviously did not want to do anything of the sort. I had not the appearance of a man with such an ambition. I had none of the conversation of such a man. I put it to Cynthia. 'They would find me out in a day,' I assured her. 'A man who wants to set up a school has got to be a pretty brainy sort of fellow. I don't know anything.' 'You got your degree.' 'A degree. At any rate, I've forgotten all I knew.' 'That doesn't matter. You have the money. Anybody with money can start a school, even if he doesn't know a thing. Nobody would think it strange.' It struck me as a monstrous slur on our educational system, but reflection told me it was true. The proprietor of a preparatory school, if he is a man of wealth, need not be able to teach, any more than an impresario need be able to write plays. 'Well, we'll pass that for the moment,' I said. 'Here's the real difficulty. How are you going to find out the school Mr Ford has chosen?' 'I have found it out already--or Nesta has. She set a detective to work. It was perfectly easy. Ogden's going to Mr Abney's. Sanstead House is the name of the place. It's in Hampshire somewhere. Quite a small school, but full of little dukes and earls and things. Lord Mountry's younger brother, Augustus Beckford, is there.' I had known Lord Mountry and his family well some years ago. I remembered Augustus dimly. 'Mountry? Do you know him? He was up at Oxford with me.' She seemed interested.