It would not have been possible for her or for anyone else to hear what they might say. In point of fact even if she had been sitting on the same seat she could have heard nothing. The last sound which had reached her, or would ever reach her in this world, was the crash of the bomb which had brought her office down over her head in 1941. She had been buried in the ruins for twenty-four hours, and when they got her out she was stone-deaf, and had so remained. With characteristic energy and fortitude she had learned lip-reading, developed a talent for cooking, and taken a post as housekeeper at a school in the country. Just before the war ended her uncle, Ambrose Paine, died. He was a very cross, determined old man whose motto through life had been “When I say a thing, I mean it.” In the course of a long and rather dreary life he had said a number of disagreeable things, and at least one courageous one. He said he would see the war out in London, and he had almost brought it off, dying only a week before the Armistice in the big old-fashioned house where he had been born. He left it, with what remained of his capital, to his niece Paulina, and she came back to town and let off all the rooms except two on the ground floor, which she kept for herself. Ambrose Paine would have been outraged and scandalized, but Paulina hadn’t really liked school life or communal cooking, and she loved London. It was odd at first to walk down familiar streets where the traffic had roared and see it go by as silently as if it were no more than a picture on the screen at a cinema. But she got used to it, and she got very good at her lip-reading. Practising it continually, it had become second nature. Interesting too. She had read some curious things from lips whose words were pitched for the ear of a friend, a lover, or an enemy. She could sit in a restaurant and know what people were saying at some table isolated by a barrage of talk and music-She looked along the gallery and read what the man who had just come in was saying.