The imagination was still a very lively one, but she had it under much better control. She could tell it now quite firmly that it was playing tricks and switch it over to devising a new monologue. Not one about an empty house! That was the sort you could do more comfortably in a lighted room in front of a nice warm fire. This one might be about a girl who got into the wrong house and stumbled on something she wasn’t meant to know. Quite effective if she could hit on just the right vein… When Jim Severn’s key turned in the lock she was a long way off.

The air outside was cold. She could see all the street-lamps. Even at the end of the road there was only a little mist to blur them. As long as she was careful with her ankle it felt all right. In fact everything in the garden was lovely. She looked at Jim Severn, and he looked at her. She had known that he was tall because of where his voice came from when she ran into him. She saw now that he held himself well, and that he was goodlooking in a pleasant, unobtrusive sort of way. It seemed a pity that she couldn’t have done a better job on her face. First impressions-

What Jim Severn saw was a girl in a torn fur coat with dark hair falling rather straight on either side of a very pale face. He knew already that she had a voice that was not like any other. When it spoke to him out of the fog his ear had been charmed and his imagination captured. It was that kind of voice. Now that he looked at her, he could only think how pale she was and hope that she wasn’t going to faint again. Then he noticed that she had rather amusing eyebrows like little slanting wings. In the lamplight her eyes looked dark.