Eve slept well, in spite of all her problems. She woke to the sound of a blackbird singing in the garden, and the bird’s song suited her waking mood, being just the thing that Nature suggested. She slipped out of bed, drew back the chintz curtains, and looked out on a dewy lawn all dappled with yellow sunlight. The soul of the child and of the artist in her exulted. She wanted to play with colours, to express herself, to make pictures. Yes; but she wanted more than that, and she knelt down in her nightdress before the looking-glass, and leaning her elbows on the table, stared into her own eyes. She questioned herself. “Woman, can you trust yourself? It is a big thing, such a big thing, both for him, and for you.” It was a sulky breakfast table that morning. Lizzie Straker had the grumps, and appeared to be on the watch for something that could be pounced on. She was ready to provoke Eve into contradicting her, but the real Eve, the Eve that mattered, was elsewhere. She hardly heard what Lizzie Straker said. “We move on this evening!” “Oh!” “Does that interest you?” “Not more than usual.” A telegram lay half hidden under Joan Gaunt’s plate. “Lizzie and I are going off for a ramble.” The hint that Eve was not wanted was conveyed with frankness. “You had better stay in.” “Dear comrade, why?” “Well, you are known here.” “That doesn’t sound very logical. Still, I don’t mind.” The dictator in Joan Gaunt was speaking, but Eve was not irked by her tyranny on this particular morning. She was ready to laugh gently, to bear with these two women, whose ignorance was so pathetic. She would be content to spend the day alone, sitting under one of the elms at the end of the bowling green, and letting herself dream. The consciousness that she was on the edge of a crisis did not worry her, for somehow she believed that the problem was going to solve itself. Joan Gaunt and Lizzie Straker started out from Basingford soon after nine, and chartered a small boy, who, for the sum of a penny, consented to act as guide to Fernhill. But all this was mere strategy, and when they had got rid of the boy, they turned aside into the fir woods instead of presenting themselves at the office where would-be visitors were supposed to interview one of the clerks. Joan Gaunt had a rough map drawn on a piece of note-paper, a map that had been sent down from headquarters. They explored the fir woods and the heath lands between Fernhill and Orchards Corner, and after an hour’s hunt they discovered what they had come in search of—Canterton’s new cottage standing with white plaster and black beams between the garden of rocks and the curtained gloom of the fir woods. Joan Gaunt scribbled a few additional directions on the map. They struck a rough sandy road that was used for carting timber, and this woodland road joined the lane that ran past Orchards Corner. It was just the place for Galahad’s car to be hidden in while they made their night attack on the empty cottage.