“She meant,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin, “to have a month’s holiday from him and think things out. And she’s got it.” Perhaps that was it. Mr. Brumley could not tell, and he spent some days in that state of perplexity which, like the weariness that heralds a cold, marks so often the onset of a new series of ideas.... Why hadn’t she come to him? Had he after all rather overloaded his memory of her real self with imaginative accessories? Had she really understood what he had been saying to her in the garden? Afterwards when he had met her eyes as he and she went over the new wing with Sir Isaac she had so manifestly—and, when one came to think of it, so tranquilly—seemed to understand.... It was such an extraordinary thing to go smashing a window like that—when there he was at hand ready to help her. She knew his address? Did she? For a moment Mr. Brumley cherished that wild surmise. Was that perhaps it? But surely she could have looked in the Telephone Directory or Who’s Who.... But if that was the truth of the matter she would have looked and behaved differently in court—quite differently. She would have been looking for him. She would have seen him.... It was queer too to recall what she had said in court about her daughters.... Could it be, he had a frightful qualm, that after all—he wasn’t the man? How little he knew of her really.... “This wretched agitation,” said Mr. Brumley, trying to flounder away anyhow from these disconcerting riddles; “it seems to unbalance them all.” But he found it impossible to believe that Lady Harman was seriously unbalanced. §4