Men hadn’t to bother of course. Jim Severn looked exactly the same at breakfast as he had done the night before under a street-lamp. There was a moment when this breakfast-table meeting seemed stranger than anything that had happened last night. This time yesterday neither of them knew that the other existed. Only six hours ago neither of them had the faintest idea what the other looked like. And now here they were, sitting down to breakfast together in his flat. If only Norrie knew! But even Norrie would be satisfied with Nannie as a chaperon. She began to laugh, and he saw how quick and sensitive her face was, and that her eyes were not really dark, but grey with brown flecks in them.

Well, you can’t just laugh in a man’s face and not tell him why, so she told him about Norris and Cousin Eleanor. And from there they seemed to get on to her American visit, she didn’t quite know how or why, and she told him about the monologues.

“Of course you have just the right voice. I should think you could make it express anything you wanted it to. Are you going on with them over here?”

“I’ve had some offers-but I told you Cousin Eleanor has been ill. And she’s not just an ordinary cousin, she brought us up.”

“Us?”

“I have a sister-Allegra. She is married to a man called Geoffrey Trent. I’m going to stay with them next week, and after that I shall have to make some plans. Cousin Eleanor is much better.”

Jim Severn was frowning.

“Now where did I come across that name?… Of course-how stupid!”

He got up, went out of the room, and came back again with a crumpled piece of paper in his hand.

“I was quite puzzled for the moment. But of course you must have dropped it last night. I picked it up on the stairs in the house we were in.” Ione took the paper and smoothed it out. It was a bit torn irregularly off the edge of a newspaper. It was rather dirty and very much creased. The words pencilled upon the blank margin were well on their way to being illegible. If they had not been familiar to Ione, she would probably have been unable to read them. As it was, she stared at them in surprise. There was a name, and the name was Geoffrey Trent. And there was an address.