It was a brilliant plan. I wondered why no one had thought of it before.

Peering out through the curtains, I saw that it had snowed in the night. Driven by the north wind, white flakes were still swirling madly in the light of the downstairs kitchen window.

Who could be up at such an hour? It was too early for Mrs. Mullet to have walked from Bishop’s Lacey.

And then I remembered!

Today was the day the intruders were arriving from London. How could I ever have forgotten such a thing?

It had been more than a month ago—on November 11, in fact, that gray and subdued autumn day upon which everyone in Bishop’s Lacey had mourned in silence all those whom they had lost in the wars—that Father had summoned us to the drawing room to break the grim news.

“I’m afraid I have to tell you that the inevitable has happened,” he said at last, turning away from the window, out of which he had been staring morosely for a quarter of an hour.

“I needn’t remind you of our precarious financial prospects …”

He said this forgetting the fact that he reminded us daily—sometimes twice in an hour—of our dwindling reserves. Buckshaw had belonged to Harriet, and when she had died without leaving a will (Who, after all, could even imagine that someone so brimming over with life could meet her end on a mountain in far-off Tibet?) the troubles had begun. For ten years now, Father had been going through the courtly steps of the “Dance of Death,” as he called it, with the gray men from His Majesty’s Board of Inland Revenue.

Yet in spite of the mounting pile of bills on the foyer table, and in spite of the increasing telephonic demands from coarse-voiced callers from London, Father had somehow managed to muddle through.

Once, because of his phobia about “the instrument,” as he called the telephone, I had answered one of these brash calls myself, bringing it to rather an amusing end by pretending to speak no English.