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Molly had gone to Oldhampton since the artists' colony there would be certain to take advantage of this gift of a summer's day to arrange a sketching party, and, as the morning's post had brought Sara a letter from Elisabeth Durward which had occasioned her considerable turmoil of spirit, she had followed her natural bent by seeking the solitude of a lonely tramp in order to think the matter out.

"Did we?" she said vaguely. "I'd forgotten." "Can't you arrange to go to Oldhampton the next day instead?" continued Sara. Molly frowned a little. At last "I tell you what I'll do," she said agreeably. "I'll come back by the afternoon train and meet you at Greenacres." And with this concession Sara had to be content.

There were always plenty of odd jobs to be done, and, after her strenuous work in France, she found it utterly impossible to settle down to the life of masterly inactivity which Selwyn had prescribed for her. Audrey greeted her with a little flurry of excitement. "Do you know that there was a Zepp over Oldhampton last night?" she asked, as they went upstairs together. "Did you hear it?"

"You're right there. The mistress isn't up for seeing visitors. And Miss Molly, she's not home she's away to Oldhampton." "But but " stammered Sara. "They're expecting me, surely? I'm Miss Tennant," she added by way of explanation. "Miss Tennant! Sakes alive!" The woman threw up her hands, staring at Sara with an almost comic expression, halting midway between bewilderment and horror.

Her companions on the journey had been an elderly spinster and her maid, and as the former had insisted upon the exclusion of every breath of outside air, Sara felt half-suffocated by the time they ran into Oldhampton Junction.

Molly poured herself out a cup of hideously stewed tea and drank it joyously to an accompaniment of shrimps and bread-and-butter, and when Sara uttered a mild protest, she only laughed and declared that it was a wholesome and digestible diet compared with some of the "studio teas" perpetrated by the artists' colony at Oldhampton, of which she was a member.

"I never was so astonished in my life as when I found that Lester Kent's wife believed him to be a model of all the virtues! I wrote and told you didn't I, Sara? that he was sent to Oldhampton Hospital? He got smashed up, driving a motor ambulance, you know." "Yes, you wrote and said that he died in hospital." "Well, his wife came to see him, with her little boy.

A big munitions factory had been established at Oldhampton, and its demands, added to the necessities of the hospital, left no loophole of excuse for slackers.

Has she come back yet?" "Come and gone again, miss. The doctor asked her to send off a wire for him." "I see." Sara nodded somewhat abstractly. She was still wondering confusedly why Molly had failed to put in any appearance at Greenacres. "What time did she come in?" "About a quarter of an hour ago, miss. She missed the early train back from Oldhampton."

She had seen the man once, in Oldhampton High Street Molly, at that time still clothed in penitence, had pointed him out to her and she had received an unpleasing impression of a lean, hatchet face with deep-set, dense-brown eyes, and of a mouth like that of a bird of prey.