The conversation passed into other channels. Mrs. Stornway listened abstractedly, hoping that Mr. Hesketh would appear. But the minutes passed and he did not come.

Punctually at half-past four Mrs. Stornway was shown into the drawing-room of Heather Patch. She was, as she meant to be, the first to arrive; Mrs. Peets and Mrs. Pepperthwaite were still unannounced, and her host himself lingered somewhere in the interior. Yes, there were the pictures, numbers of them, leaning against each other, their strings and wires sticking out untidily, their faces turned to the wall. Mrs. Stornway studied their brown backs with passionate interest. Which of them would be it? A friend had once told her that she was psychic beyond ordinary women. Surely she could use this special power to pierce Mr. Blandfoot’s secret? She stood still, emptied her mind of thought, and tried to let the brown shapes before her pass into it. At first she saw nothing but knowing-looking dogs with heads cocked sideways and pipes in their mouths. Then one picture began to oust the others: its subject remained obscure, but she recognized its material form and, tiptoeing across the room, took hold of the frame and began to draw it slowly backwards.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs. Stornway.’ The voice startled her so much that she let go the picture, which subsided with a thud. She rose awkwardly, her feet imprisoned by the picture-cords.

‘Oh, Mr. Blandfoot, forgive me! I couldn’t resist taking a look!’

‘How charming of you to be so interested,’ he said, coming forward, his large figure blocking up the light and casting a soft gloom before it. ‘Tell me which one you were looking at.’

Mrs. Stornway’s impulse was always to lie.

‘This one,’ she said, indicating one of the smaller pictures.

Mr. Blandfoot pulled it out.

‘Ah, Jake,’ he said, looking at it. ‘Poor old Jake with a bandaged head.’

They went to the window. It was a dog—a dog with his head on one side and tied up in a handkerchief.

‘Why, what’s happened to him?’ she said, looking from Mr. Blandfoot to the picture and back to Mr. Blandfoot again.

He was a tall man, put together so loosely that one or other of his limbs always seemed on the verge of dislocation. His hair, which was thin and pale, the same colour as his face, seemed to cling together, as though for protection, in half a dozen long lank wisps, showing pink tracts between. His face was bony, his features were irregular, and his eyes so light they seemed to have been bleached. He could never give an effect of neatness, thought Mrs. Stornway: even the skin on the hand which held the picture was unevenly tinted, it looked coarse and porous without being firm and hardly seemed to fit him.

‘What’s happened to the dog?’ she repeated.

‘Why,’ he said slowly, ‘dogs will be dogs. I had to teach him——’

But what the lesson was Mr. Blandfoot had sought to inculcate Mrs. Stornway never knew; Mrs. Peets and Mrs. Pepperthwaite arrived simultaneously, and they had tea in the bow-window, flanked by the orange-and-blue curtains. Outside could be seen the patches of heather which gave the house its name. It flowered with a commendable persistence, although in the forefront of villadom’s advance—trenches, incipient walls, overturned wheelbarrows, splodges of whitewash, moist spots for mixing mortar. It looked as dry and wiry and tenacious as the owner of Heather Patch, only more beautiful, thought Mrs. Stornway unwillingly.

The work went on apace, and of the forty-odd pictures only a mere handful remained to be hung. Many of them had been photographs of the Far East, representing, as often as not, severe, thin men in shirtsleeves, standing very erect outside their temporary dwellings, putting, as it seemed, the thought of tiffin behind them. Others showed native women holding their babies, or naked warriors in open formation holding spears. No one ever seemed to sit down. All the pictures suggested a sort of flimsy precarious verticality. For contrast there were views of English interiors, the dreams of nostalgia, where everyone was sitting or lying or reclining. The largest of these, a picture displaying a group of couchant rich people watching their children, dressed in costumes of a bygone age, resting from a game of Ring-a-ring of Roses, Mrs. Stornway hung over the piano. The picture and the instrument were exactly the same length.

‘I believe,’ she murmured, ‘that Mrs. Marling has a copy of this, only not such a fine one, at The Grove. Do you remember it, Mrs. Peets?’

‘You forget,’ said Mrs. Peets, ‘I’ve never seen the inside of the good lady’s house.’

‘Oh,’ said Mrs. Stornway, with well-assumed confusion, ‘I thought everyone——You remember it, Muriel?’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Pepperthwaite, ‘in the dining-room.’

‘No, not in the dining-room,’ Mrs. Stornway remarked complacently, ‘it’s upstairs, the second passage you come to, on the right, if my memory serves me. He really ought to see the house, oughtn’t he, Mrs. Peets? Alice Marling has such interesting pictures.’

‘You forget, I haven’t had the privilege of going,’ said Mrs. Peets again, busying herself with a picture. Only three remained unhung. The exaltation Mrs. Stornway had felt as one by one the pictures were disposed of in the various rooms deepened into ecstasy. She persuaded herself that the last of the three was the one she was examining when Mr. Blandfoot interrupted her. They were back in the drawing-room; it was the largest room, and it’s walls still had empty spots, though they had thought it finished when they left it. In the intoxication that possessed her, as the moment of revelation drew near, Mrs. Stornway felt that there was no limit to her powers: she could say anything, do anything: she could bring Mahomet to the mountain, Mr. Blandfoot to Mrs. Marling, and everything she did would become her.

‘I always think,’ she said, ‘that in all Settlemarsh there’s no one so really worth while as Alice Marling.’ To make this declaration she stopped working, came into the middle of the room and clasped her hands in front of her.

There was a pause. Then Mr. Blandfoot took another picture and, mounting the steps with the cord in his mouth, muttered, ‘Why are you always talking about this Mrs. Marling?’

‘Oh,’ Mrs. Stornway exclaimed, her eyes aglow with the fire of evangelizing the heathen, ‘she stands for all that is best in Settlemarsh—so it seems to me. There was a time when she used to keep open house.’

‘She doesn’t keep open house for me,’ said Mrs. Peets.

‘Nor for me,’ Mr. Blandfoot echoed. Again his utterance was impeded, this time, as Mrs. Stornway saw when he turned his head, by a long nail that he held clamped between his teeth.

There they both stood, Mrs. Peets and Mr. Blandfoot, the rejected of Mrs. Marling, their faces to the wall and the silence deepening round them. Mrs. Pepperthwaite, who had taken the last picture but one, a study of Highland cattle in a mist, and was carrying it about while she gazed inquiringly but helplessly at the crowded picture-rail, flung herself into the breach.

‘Why, there’s only one more left!’ she cried nervously. ‘It must be the picture that everyone’s been talking about! Now, let’s all guess what it is.’

Her intervention was a complete success. The cloud cleared from the brow of Mrs. Peets; Mrs. Stornway’s face lost its Sibylline look; and Mr. Blandfoot turned round and sat on the top of the steps, his knees projecting enormously, his chin supported by his hands while he looked down at them with an enigmatic smile.

‘First of all, how did you get hold of it?’ demanded Mrs. Peets.

‘Yes,’ echoed Mrs. Stornway a little wanly, ‘how did it come into your possession?’

‘Perhaps we ought not to ask him that,’ said Mrs. Pepperthwaite coyly. Her success as a peacemaker had given a sense of power which she seldom enjoyed.