She went in, her gaze still averted; and he felt sure that there were tears in her eyes.

He went back to the sitting room, puzzled and frowning. If she were really living on her nerves to the extent her reaction to the misunderstanding seemed to imply, how had she managed to keep up appearances when she had first arrived? He rang for Jolly. There was a spacious dining alcove one step up from the main room, and he drew curtains aside revealing a dining-table already set, Sheraton chairs and a long and graceful sideboard. Steaming vegetables stood on a hot-plate and there was a bottle of wine, the cork drawn. Before Naomi Smith returned, he had put two slices of Spanish honeydew melon on the table, laid so that two people could sit opposite each other.

He heard her coming. There were no signs of tears, now, and he could have been mistaken before, although her make-up was suspiciously new. But her smile was bright. He handed her up the single step, drawing out her chair.

“Sugar or ginger?”

“I don’t think I’ll have either,” she said. “It looks delicious.”

Rollison took a little ginger, and they ate, for a time, in silence. Then he asked with a gleam in his eyes :

“Do you find it rewarding?”

She drew a deep breath.

“It can be. But at the same time it can be—purgatory.” There was such feeling in her voice that he felt a kind of hurt for her. “And when things go wrong, as they have done lately, I almost despair.” She hardly seemed to notice Jolly’s soft-footed approach to change the plates, as she went on: “They really are girls of exceptional talent. I am quite serious about that. The hostel was founded three years ago, when there was a scandal at a red-brick university. A dozen girls were sent down for drug taking, and a certain amount of sexual promiscuity.