“I wish I could believe you. Where will you go for honey, Syb? Advertise or what? Or eat humble pie?”

“Never that! Not on your life! Mrs. Black!” cried Mrs. Foster in a voice mellifluous with cordiality, “how good of you to come. Where are you sitting? Over there, are you? Good. Who’s died?” she muttered as Mrs. Black moved, away. “Why were we told to sympathize?”

“Her husband.”

“That’s all right then. I wasn’t overdoing it.”

“Her brother’s arrived to live with her.”

“He wouldn’t happen to be a gardener, I suppose.”

Verity put down the tea-pot and stared at her. “You won’t believe this,” she said, “but I rather think I heard someone say he would. Mrs. Jim, it was. Yes, I’m sure. A gardener.”

“My dear! I wonder if he’s any good. My dear, what a smack in the eye that would be for McBride. Would it be all right to tackle Mrs. Black now, do you think? Just to find out?”

“Well—”

“Darling, you know me. I’ll be the soul of tact.”

“I bet you will,” said Verity.

She watched Mrs. Foster insinuate herself plumply through the crowd. The din was too great for anything she said to be audible but Verity could guess at the compliments sprinkled upon the Vicar, who was a good-looking man, the playful badinage with the village. And all the time, while her pampered little hands dangled from her wrists, Mrs. Foster’s pink coiffure tacked this way and that, making toward Mrs. Black, who sat in her bereavement upon a chair at the far end of the room.

Verity, greatly entertained, watched the encounter, the gradual response, the ineffable concern, the wide-open china-blue stare, the compassionate shakes of the head and, finally, the withdrawal of both ladies from the dining-room, no doubt into Syb’s boudoir. “Now,” thought Verity, “she’ll put in the hard tackle.”