She found that Lizzie Straker was in a bad temper when they sat down to lunch. The _tête-à-tête_ in the summer-house had been too impersonal to please her, and Lawrence Kentucky had shown great tactlessness in asking questions about Eve. “Is Miss Carfax here? Where did you pick her up? Oh, one of Pallas’s kittens! Jolly good-looking girl.” Lizzie was feeling scratchy, and she sparred with Eve. “You’re a puzzler. I don’t believe you’re a bit keen, not what I call keen. I can’t sleep sometimes before doing something big.” “I’m quite keen enough.” “I don’t think you show it. You’ll have to buck up a bit, won’t she, Joan? We have to send in sealed reports, you know. Mrs. Falconer expects to know the inside of everybody.” “Perhaps she expects too much.” “Anyhow, it’s her money we’re spending.” Eve flushed. “I shall pay her back some day before very long.” “You needn’t think I called you a sponger—I didn’t.” “Oh, well, would it have mattered?” They spent the afternoon in the garden, and had tea under the may tree. Joan Gaunt had asked for the bill, and for three packets of sandwiches. They paid the one, and stowed the sandwiches away in their knapsacks, and about five o’clock they resumed their walking tour. A march of two miles brought them into the thick of the fir woods, and they had entered them by the timber track without meeting a soul. Joan Gaunt chose a spot where a clump of young firs offered a secret camping ground, for the lower boughs of the young trees being still green and bushy, made a dense screen that hid them admirably. Eve understood that a night attack was imminent, and realised that no individual rambles would be authorised by Joan Gaunt. She was to be penned in with these two fanatics for six long hours, an undenounced traitor who had betrayed them into the enemy’s hands. Canterton would have men on guard, and for the moment she was tempted to tell them the truth and so save them from being fooled. But some subtle instinct held her back. She felt herself to be part of the adventure, that she would allow circumstances to lead, circumstances that might prove of peculiar significance. She was curious to see what would happen, curious to see how the woman in her would react. So Eve lay down among the young firs with her knapsack under her head, and watched the sunlight playing in the boughs of the veterans overhead. They made a net of sable and gold that stretched out over her, a net that some god might let fall to tangle the lives of women and of men. She felt the imminence of Nature, felt herself part of the mysterious movement that could be sensed even in this solemn brooding wood. Her two comrades lay on their fronts, each with a chin thrust out over a book. But Lizzie Straker soon grew restless. She kept clicking her heels together, and picking up dry fir cones and pulling them to pieces. Eve watched her from behind half closed lids.