She saw all these things and admired them. Her eye wandered from the engraving of Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen in a contemporary frame of yellow maple to similarly framed reproductions of Bubbles, The Soul’s Awakening, and The Black Brunswicker. Her heart was really quite full of thankfulness. A comfortable and tasteful room in a comfortable and tasteful flat. During the years when she had worked as a governess for the meagre salary which was all that a governess could then command she had never had any grounds for hoping that such comfort would be hers. If she had remained a governess, there would have been no plush curtains, no Brussels carpet, no steel engravings, no easy chairs upholstered in blue and green tapestry with curving walnut legs, Victorian waists, and wide well-padded laps. By a strange turn of events she had ceased to be a governess, and had become a private investigator, and so successful had the investigations proved that they had made possible the plush, the tapestry, the walnut, and the Brussels pile. Deeply and sincerely religious, Miss Silver thanked what she was accustomed to call Providence for her preservation throughout two years of war.

She was about to resume the sock, which she was knitting for her youngest nephew Alfred who had just entered the Air Force, when the door opened and her valuable middle-aged Emma announced, “Mrs. Underwood.” There came in one of those plump women whose clothes fit them with unbecoming exactness. Mrs. Underwood’s black cloth suit moulded her too frankly. She wore a little too much face powder, a little too much lipstick, and it would have been better if she had dispensed altogether with eye shadow. The waves of her hair, under one of the odd hats just then affected by the ultra smart, were too set, too formal, too fresh from the hairdresser’s hands. Her skirt was too short and her stockings too thin for a pair of buxom legs, and if her shoes were not so tight as to be excruciatingly painful they very much belied their appearance. She advanced with a bright smile and an extended hand.