Death at the Opera

chapter four: facts

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i

When the Headmaster’s letter arrived at the Stone House, Wandles Parva, Mrs. Bradley was breakfasting. Out in the garden, dimly perceived through a frosted casement window, the trees were leafless and the green grass swam nebulously between the bottom of the window and the sky.

There were three other letters by the side of Mrs. Bradley’s plate, and, having concluded her meal except for the last half-cup of coffee, she picked up the envelopes in turn, scrutinized them, then laid aside the one which contained Mr. Cliffordson’s urgent missive and dealt briefly with the others. The first envelope contained a publisher’s catalogue of psychological and psycho-analytical treatises; the second was a begging letter; the third contained a cheque and the thanks of a grateful patient who, according to her family, had once been a candidate for a lunatic asylum, but was now, owing to Mrs. Bradley’s efforts, a useful, ornamental and popular member of society.

Mrs. Bradley threw everything on the fire except the cheque, on which she stood the sugar-basin as a paperweight, and then she opened Mr. Cliffordson’s envelope. She read his letter twice and then replaced it in the covering. It had been written before the inquest on Calma Ferris, and so he had not attempted to foreshadow what the verdict of the coroner’s jury might be, but he stated, in a firm, pedagogic and yet scholarly hand, that he was certain the unfortunate woman was the victim of murder. He gave all his reasons for coming to this terrible conclu-sion; said frankly that he did not want to drag in the police unless or until it was absolutely necessary, and promised to send Mrs. Bradley a telegram as soon as the verdict at the inquest was known.

Mrs. Bradley seated herself in an arm-chair beside the fire, picked up a bag which contained a half-finished woollen jumper in stripes of mauve and green, and began to knit. At the end of twenty minutes she rang the bell, and her maid Celestine appeared.

“I am going away for about three weeks,” said Mrs. Bradley.

“Bien, madame.”

“Pack suitable raiment for a school-mistress.”

“A school-mistress,” repeated Celestine, obediently. “Bien, madame.”

“Then send Henri to the vicarage with my compliments and request him to ask the vicar to lend me an arithmetic text-book of a simple kind.”

“Bien, madame.”

“Come back when you have done all this. I have more to say.”

Celestine disappeared, and Mrs. Bradley completed three inches of jumper. Then there was a tap at the door, and the vicar entered. He drew a small clock from the pocket of his waterproof, gazed at it with an expression of puzzled inquiry, apologized, and went out again. In about half an hour he returned without the clock and with an armful of battered-looking books.

“Good morning,” he said. “Er—arithmetic text-books.”

He spread out the selection on the hearthrug. Mrs. Bradley put down her knitting and bent to examine the books. Having made her choice and thanked the vicar, she said:

“On Monday I commence my duties as form mistress and arithmetic teacher at the Hillmaston Co-Educational Day School.”

She chuckled at his first expression of astonishment, but his face gradually cleared.

“Ah! You are going to study the psychology of co-education,” he said. “Very interesting, these modern ideas. I hope you will enjoy yourself.”

“I hope so too,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Go away now, dear child. I must learn some simple arithmetic.”

The vicar took his leave, and when he had gone Celestine reappeared, with the little red enamelled clock from the hall table in her hand and an expression of indignation upon her vivacious countenance.

“The naughty old one!” she exclaimed, displaying the clock. “Figure to yourself, madame, his duplicity!”

“Did he pocket the clock?” inquired Mrs. Bradley.

“But certainly, madame,” replied Celestine. “He puts it into his pocket and goes to promenade himself.”

Mrs. Bradley cackled harshly.

“Bless the man!” she said. “Go to the post office, Celestine, and send this telegram.”

She wrote a few words in her tiny medico-legal caligraphy, and Celestine went away again. When the door was shut, Mrs. Bradley picked up an arithmetic text-book and gravely began to study the theory of long division of money. ii

Form Lower Three Commercial, dazzled optically by Mrs. Bradley’s blue-and-sulphur jumper and uncomfortably conscious that her black eyes were sharp with amused understanding of the peculiarities of the twelve-year-old human mind, decided to reserve judgment on their new form mistress, and spent a quietly strenuous first period in wrestling with a lengthy test on vulgar and decimal fractions.

Mrs. Bradley had arrived on the premises at eight thirty-five, had inspected her colleagues collectively rather than individually, and had asked the Headmaster for a programme of The Mikado production. He had produced it without comment, but had looked inquiringly at her. Mrs. Bradley, smiling in a way that reminded him oddly of the picture of a dragon which used to alarm him when he was a child, made no remark other than a word of thanks for the programme, and had been taken in tow by Miss Freely, who conducted her into the hall for prayers. After prayers, a brief, semi-military ceremony of disciplinary rather than religious significance, the Headmaster had introduced her to her form, which, as it happened, took arithmetic during the first period on Monday mornings.

“Good morning, boys and girls,” he said.

“Good morning, sir. Good morning, madam.”

It was as meaningless and as old-fashioned as a nineteenth century board school greeting. Mrs. Bradley reflected. She bowed in her own precise, nineteenth century way, and smiled her reptilian smile at the children.

“This is your new form mistress. Her name is Bradley. Mrs. Bradley. B-r-a-d-l-e-y,” said the Headmaster. “Who are the class monitors?”

“Kathleen Bell and I, sir,” said a young boy in the front row.

“Very well. Who is responsible for cleaning the blackboard?”

“I am, sir.” Another fresh-faced child rose, looking scared.

“Very good, Collins.”

He walked out. Mrs. Bradley said benignly to the class at large:

“How long does this lesson last?”

Several voices informed her that it lasted until a quarter past ten. One young man was particularly emphatic. Mrs. Bradley considered him for a moment. Then:

“I hope that you are right,” she said, in her deep, rich voice. The form stirred uncomfortably. It was at that point that they decided to reserve judgment. iii

Mrs. Bradley had a free period during the afternoon, and she spent it in consultation with the Headmaster. She obtained from him but little extra information, however, for, beyond reiterating his belief that Calma Ferris had been murdered, and reproducing the arguments he had collected in support of that belief, he could give her no assistance and could offer no suggestions. The only new matter which he could produce was an account of the conversation he had had with Calma Ferris on the morning of the day she met her death.

“She came to me to ask my advice,” he said. “It seemed that she had received a telegram from her aunt, who keeps a small private hotel at Bognor Regis, warning her against a man named Helm whom she had met there during the summer holiday. I was not able to elicit any particular reason from Miss Ferris for her aunt’s seeing fit to warn her against this man, and so all I could do was to reassure her, and to advise her to keep a look-out for the man in the neighbourhood and inform me directly he importuned her. I don’t see what else I could have done. Oh, I got a description of the man, of course. Here it is.”

“Had she any other relatives, do you know,” asked Mrs. Bradley, “besides this particular aunt?”

“I am sure she had none whatsoever. It seems a queer thing to say, perhaps, but I think she liked the school and the life here chiefly because she had nothing outside her work to interest her or engage her attention. I know she was an orphan, and I never heard of any other relatives apart from this aunt. I know, too, that she was to be the principal beneficiary under her aunt’s will, although how much the older lady had to leave I could not give you the slightest idea.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Bradley. “By the way,” she added, “I feel certain that most, if not all, of your staff know why I am here, and therefore, as the cat is out of the bag, I should prefer to give up my class-teaching and devote myself to this investigation.”

“I was afraid your reputation might have preceded you,” the Headmaster admitted. “I can easily arrange for someone to take over the form until we get a teacher appointed. You mean that you have an idea to work on?”

“Several,” said Mrs. Bradley concisely. “The first is that the aunt, having warned her niece hurriedly by telegram last Friday week, would probably have followed up the telegram by an explanatory letter.”

“None was produced at the inquest,” said the Headmaster. “And yet it is impossible to suppose that an elderly lady would have deemed a cryptically worded telegram a sufficient deterrent to prevent her niece from entangling herself with an undesirable widower.”

“How was the telegram worded?” inquired Mrs. Bradley. The Headmaster wrinkled his brow, but his excellent memory soon produced the required sequence of words.

“Beware helm widower suspicious circumstances asked school.”

“This afternoon, when school is over, I shall go to Miss Ferris’s lodgings and see what I can discover,” said Mrs. Bradley. “There certainly ought to be a letter to explain that telegram.”

“Go now,” suggested Mr. Cliffordson. “I’ll go and take the class.”

So at five minutes past three Mrs. Bradley, an eyesore to all and sundry in her queer but expensive garments, went briskly through the quiet streets that bordered the school and made her way to the house where Miss Ferris had lodged.

The landlady herself opened the door.

“I understand that you have rooms to let,” said Mrs. Bradley, without preamble.

“Come in,” said the woman. Mrs. Bradley entered the house, a small villa, and was shown into the drawing-room.

“Several people have been after the rooms, but they were all these nosey-parkers who only wanted a thrill out of staying a week or so where a suicide had lived, that’s all. They wouldn’t have been permanent, any of them, and I didn’t see having to tell them all about her, poor woman, which anybody could see with half an eye was all they wanted. But I could do with the money, unfortunately, so if you’ll take the rooms I shall have to ask you not to talk about her to me, that’s all.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Bradley.

“It’s all this talk about suicide that does me down,” the woman continued. “Whatever anybody says, I knew her, and she wasn’t one to commit suicide, no matter what happened, and that I’ll swear. A real Christian woman was Miss Ferris, and well brought up, and it’s a sin and a shame for them to go and pretend she’d drowned herself just because they’re afraid of finding out who did it!”

“Afraid of finding out who did it?” repeated Mrs. Bradley, affecting to misunderstand the implication.

“Well, what else can you think?”

Mrs. Bradley considered the woman. She was flushed and earnest, a smallish, care-worn person, still on the right side of middle-age, but prematurely grey and with a face which had known anxiety and trouble. Mrs. Bradley learned later that she was a widow with one child.

“I think you might be right,” Mrs. Bradley observed. “The Headmaster of the school thinks as you do. He is having the case investigated independently of the police.”

“I don’t take much account of other people’s business as a rule,” the woman continued, “because I haven’t the time nor the curiosity. But I feel ever so sorry about poor Miss Ferris and the things they are saying about her. Why, even that aunt of hers, that came here the day before the inquest, told me some things that I could have turned round and told her weren’t true, only she did genuinely seem upset about it all and I didn’t like to be hard. Miss Ferris was her only niece, you see, and she was dreadfully cut up about her death.”

“What did the aunt think was the cause of Miss Ferris’s suicide?” asked Mrs. Bradley. “You say she believed it was suicide?”

“Oh, she believed it, and ought to be ashamed of herself for harbouring such a wicked thought,” said the woman vehemently. “And a fine tale she told me! According to her—although, take it from me that knew poor Miss Ferris far better than she did, her having lived here just on eight years, and I do miss her, too, for all she was so quiet and nice—it was a lie from beginning to end—according to her, Miss Ferris had had this man Helm in her room one night at the boarding-house, and, thinking they had been discovered, they set up an alarm of burglars. And Miss Ferris’s aunt, if you please, thinks something happened that night between them, and that Miss Ferris couldn’t face the future unmarried. Anyway, rather than have her marry this Helm, she sent her a telegram, which worried poor Miss Ferris dreadfully, and me, too, for neither of us could really make head or tail of it. So Miss Ferris said she should show the Headmaster and ask his advice, which hardly looks like the seventh commandment, does it?”

Mrs. Bradley concurred in this delicately expressed opinion, and then asked whether the telegram had been followed by a letter.

“There was a letter,” the woman admitted. “It came Friday evening, by the nine o’clock post, only nobody was here to take it in, because my little girl and Miss Ferris and me were all at the concert. Of course, I got a shock when Miss Ferris didn’t come on the stage, and more of a shock when she never came home that night, and the police told me she was dead. But there was the letter on the mat, and I put it in her room as usual, and there it is now, I suppose. I’ll go and see.”

She returned in a few moments.

“It had fallen into the hearth and slipped under the front of the fender,” she said. “That’s why nobody found it, I suppose. Here it is, anyway. I don’t suppose it matters much who reads it now everything legal is over.”

The letter was long and rambling, and beyond conveying an impression that the man Helm was a thoroughly undesirable person, gave no more help than the telegram had done. The letter did not give any clue to the whereabouts of Helm, nor any definite reason why Miss Ferris should avoid his society. The aunt had stated vaguely: “Things have come out about him which nobody suspected, but he seemed to me a bold, undesirable fellow,” but she had not committed herself further, except to confess that her partner at the boarding-house had given him Miss Ferris’s school address.

Mrs. Bradley read the letter twice, made a note of the aunt’s address, paid a week’s rent for the rooms and returned in a very thoughtful mood. It was a quarter-past four by the time she reached the school gate, and the junior forms had been dismissed and came past her in groups. One child of about twelve accosted her.

“Please, Mrs. Bradley, was Miss Ferris really murdered?”

Mrs. Bradley smiled in the manner of a well-disposed and kindly boa-constrictor, and poked her small interlocutor in the ribs.

“Go and ask your Headmaster,” she said. But when Moira Malley, the sixth-form girl who had taken part in the opera, stopped her outside the Headmaster’s room and put the same question, Mrs. Bradley was a good deal more interested.

“What is your name?” she asked. And when the girl had told her, she said: “Why, you are one of the people I want to talk to. Can you keep a secret?”

The Irish girl smiled.

“Yes, I think I can,” she answered. She looked pale, Mrs. Bradley thought, but was an attractive creature, with a wide mouth, grey eyes and dark-brown hair.

“Wait downstairs in my form-room—you know which one?—for a quarter of an hour. If I am not with you by that time, come back here and knock for me.”

Moira descended the stairs, and Mrs. Bradley tapped at the Headmaster’s door.

“Nothing to report,” she announced, “but that your opinion is shared by Miss Ferris’s landlady. The landlady knew Miss Ferris for eight years, and is certain that she would never have committed suicide. One other question arises which may be important. Was Miss Ferris pregnant, do you know? Was it suggested that that might have been a reason for her suicide?”

“She was not pregnant,” replied Mr. Cliffordson. “The coroner asked the question at the inquest, and I myself heard both the question and the doctor’s reply.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Bradley. She made an illegible note on a clean page of the notebook which, together with a small silver pencil on a chain, she drew from the capacious pocket of her skirt. “With your permission I am now going to have a talk with Moira Malley.”

“There’s something worrying that girl,” said Mr. Cliffordson. “She hasn’t been herself since the dress rehearsal.”

“When was that?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

“On the Tuesday. It was rather a failure, you know. Poor Moira was dreadfully nervous, and hasn’t been right since. I’m sorry for that child. Her mother lives in Ireland, on nothing a year, more or less, and the girl is here on a foundation scholarship. Her books and most of her clothes come out of the grant she receives, and, for the rest, an aunt with a family of her own takes her in. Last summer holiday things were in such a bad way that the girl got herself a holiday post as nursery governess, as it was not possible for her mother to find the return fare for Moira to visit her home. She is a clever girl and a very nice girl. We’re going to see whether she can win the scholarship to Girton which the governing body offers, and, if she does, I am going to give her a post here later on, if she’ll take it. She is a girl of excellent character and is exceedingly popular here, both with the staff and the boys and girls.”

It was less than the specified quarter of an hour later when Mrs. Bradley walked into the form-room of the Lower Third Commercial. Moira Malley had switched on the lights and was reading. She put the book down, rose to her feet and smiled a little nervously as Mrs. Bradley came in. The little old woman shut the door and Moira drew forward a chair for her. Mrs. Bradley sat down, but the girl remained standing. Mrs. Bradley looked at the clock. It was ten minutes to five.

“What about your people?” she asked. Moira shrugged.

“Aunt doesn’t mind. Often she doesn’t know whether I’m in the house or not until supper-time. I get my own tea. The others have theirs earlier.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Well, sit down, child, and tell me what’s the matter.”

“What’s the matter?” the girl echoed. She flushed painfully. “I don’t think there’s anything—”

“Why did you ask me whether Miss Ferris had been murdered?” was Mrs. Bradley’s next question.

“Well, everybody from the Third Form upwards is saying so. And you—you’re not really a mistress, are you?”

“No,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I’m not. And Miss Ferris may have been murdered.”

“That’s what everybody says,” said the girl. “John Lestrange said nobody would have sent for you if there hadn’t been murder in the air.”

“The graceless child!” said Mrs. Bradley, laughing. “I didn’t know he was at school here. He was at Rugby when last I heard from him.”

“Yes; he’s only been here a term, and he’s jolly sick about it,” said Moira. “His mother, Lady Selina Lestrange, thought he ought to have co-education. She’d heard a lot about it, or something, so she sent John here. His sister is an awfully nice girl, I believe, but she did not come here. Her name’s Sallie.”

“My niece,” said Mrs. Bradley complacently.

“Oh, is she? Then John’s your nephew— Oh, that’s silly and obvious, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Bradley, who had been out of England for some months previously, and so had not kept track of Lady Selina’s gyrations, was wondering what her massive sister-in-law would think when she received news that a murder had been committed at the co-educational school which had commended itself to her so heartily a few months before. Mrs. Bradley could visualize a satisfied sixteen-year-old John Lestrange returning to Rugby the following term, if the authorities there would take him back. She chuckled, and Moira Malley looked surprised.

“A mental picture,” Mrs. Bradley explained. “But we must be serious. I want some help. Have you any idea when it was that you last saw Miss Ferris alive?”

The girl did not answer, and when Mrs. Bradley looked at her she saw that she was biting her bottom lip and that her hands were clenched so that the knuckles showed white.

“You need not be afraid,” said Mrs. Bradley gently. “Tell me the truth, child, and don’t leave anything out.”

The girl remained silent.

“Very well,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Please yourself, my dear. Come and show me the water-lobby where the body was found.”

“No!” said the girl. “I can’t go round there after dark! I can’t face it!”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Bradley, as equably as before. There was a note of hysteria in the girl’s voice, so the little old woman laid a skinny claw on her knee and said:

“I understand that on the night of the performance Miss Ferris cut herself and had to go into the water-lobby to staunch the bleeding. Is that right?”

Moira began to cry.

“I promised I wouldn’t tell,” she said, “but as you seem to know, I suppose it doesn’t matter.”

She was crying so bitterly that Mrs. Bradley had some difficulty in making out the words.

“It was Mr. Smith. He came charging round a corner and knocked into Miss Ferris and broke her glasses. A bit of broken glass dug in her cheek just under the eye. It made the tiniest little mark, but it bled a good bit and she said she would go and wash it. That’s the last I saw of her. The next day Mr. Smith came round to aunt’s home and said he wanted to speak to me about using our hockey pitch for a boy’s match. It was Saturday”—she was regaining control over herself, and her words were becoming easier to follow—“and we hadn’t a match in the afternoon. Aunt sent for me to talk to him, after he’d told her what he wanted, and when we were in the drawing-room together he told me that Miss Ferris was dead, and asked me to promise not to tell about the accident to Miss. Ferris’s glasses. He said he had fearful wind up when he found out that somebody had seen it happen, because it made him partly responsible for her committing suicide by putting the idea of water, that is, drowning, into her head. It seemed silly to me, but, of course, if he thought she had been murdered…”

She broke off suddenly. Mrs. Bradley pursed up her mouth into a little beak, and decided that the girl was not being entirely frank with her. But what Moira was hiding, Time, Mrs. Bradley’s experience informed her, would probably disclose.

“At what time did the accident take place?” she asked, determined at the moment not to press the girl.

“Oh, let me see. Very near the beginning of the opera, because I was just going to make my first entrance—you know—the ‘Three Little Maids from School’ bit—so I couldn’t stop and see to poor Miss Ferris. The other two, ‘Yum-Yum’ and ‘Pitti-Sing,’ were already in the wings, only they are both mistresses, so I didn’t like to tack on to them too closely, so neither of them saw it happen. It was only me.”

“Was there the slightest possibility that anyone else could have witnessed the collision?” Mrs. Bradley asked.

“Anybody in the men-principals’ dressing-room might have seen it, but I don’t know who was there.”

“And you were about to make your first entrance?” pursued Mrs. Bradley thoughtfully. “Thank you, Moira. That’s all, then. Cheer up, child.”

When the girl had gone, Mrs. Bradley switched off the lights in the form-room and made her way to the water-lobby where the death of Calma Ferris had occurred. The schoolkeeper was busy with a broom and a pail of damp sawdust, and politely stood aside to allow her to enter.

“You aren’t superstitious, ma’am, I see,” he observed, noticing that Mrs. Bradley was pressing the tap which flowed into what he had now become accustomed to refer to at the Hillmaston Arms as “the fatal bowl.”

“Oh, is this It?” asked Mrs. Bradley, with a show of great interest.

“It is, ma’am. Took me an hour and ten minutes to get all that nasty messy clay out of the waste-pipe, too. What with that and seeing what was wrong with the electric light switch, I had a busy day Sunday, I can tell you.”

“I can imagine it,” returned Mrs. Bradley courteously. “And what was wrong with the electric light switch?”

“Some of them boys had been up to their mischief, I reckon. The switch ’ad worked a bit loose, you see—I was meaning to replace it—and it was easy enough to take it off and put the wiring out of action, and put the whole thing back again. Barring that it hung a bit loose, as I said before, you wouldn’t notice anything wrong, but when you actually went to switch on the light nothing wouldn’t happen, ma’am. See? Them boys do it just for devilment. They done it to all the school switches one Guy Fawkes’s night, and the Headmaster made ’em put ’em all right again. Mr. Pritchard learns ’em all the tricks. He’s real clever at electricity—got the boys in his form to make the school a wireless set—ah, and it’s a beauty, too!—and any of the young devils could have put that switch out of order as easy as look at it.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Bradley. “The switch was not out of order on the Thursday evening, then, when you did your cleaning?”

“ ’Course it wasn’t,” replied the schoolkeeper. “I ’as to have the lights on every night at this time of the year, to do my work, you see. Ah, and I can go further, ma’am. It was all right on the Friday evening, when I cleared up. I didn’t do more than I could help, that Friday evening, as I had to get the hall ready for the concert, but I did happen to come in here, because I remember for why. I does the inks in this lobby and I remembered Mr. Cliffordson asking me about a gallon jar of blue-black that had somehow got mislaid from stock, so I thought I’d just have a deck in here to see if it had got itself mixed up with the ink already in use. I knew it hadn’t, but I’d got to satisfy him with what you might call an official observation and report, and it just happened to occur to me. So I know the switch was all right then, because I used it.”

“I suppose Miss Ferris herself had not tampered with it?” suggested Mrs. Bradley.

“Considering the poor lady didn’t know no more about electricity than to ask me to come and look at her electric iron she used in the sitting-room at her lodgings and tell heir why it wouldn’t heat up, when all the time one of the wires at the plug end had come right out and she’d never noticed it—” said the schoolkeeper.

“Odd,” Mrs. Bradley reflected, as she made her way to her new lodgings without having washed her hands, “that Calma Ferris should have gone into a pitch-dark lobby to wash a cut on her face. I should imagine that she did nothing of the sort. However, we shall see.”

When she arrived at her lodgings she scrutinized the books on Miss Ferris’s little book-shelf, took down the script of The Mikado, was immersed in it when the landlady brought in her tea, and was still immersed in it when the landlady brought in her supper. By the time the woman came in again to clear away, however, Mrs. Bradley had returned the book to the shelf and was playing Patience. She grinned in her saurian fashion at the landlady and asked after her little girl.

The woman was consumed with curiosity, for she had recognized the book which Mrs. Bradley had been studying. Dozens of times had she good-naturedly held it in her hands and prompted Miss Ferris when the latter had been learning the part of “Katisha.” The amount of time Mrs. Bradley had spent in studying the book, and the sight of Mrs. Bradley’s notebook and pencil, and the undecipherable hieroglyphics with which the only page she could see, as she set the table, had been covered, made her very anxious to talk about her late lodger, in spite of the fact that she had told Mrs. Bradley she did not want to discuss Miss Ferris. She took as long as she could over clearing the supper things away, while Mrs. Bradley, black eyes intent on the small cards, appeared to be absorbed in her game and unconscious that such a person as Calma Ferris had ever existed. At last the woman could bear it no longer. Coming back with an unnecessary brush and crumb-tray, she said:

“Have you heard anything more, Mrs. Bradley?”

Mrs. Bradley looked up.

“Yes, a little,” she said. “Tell me. Did Miss Ferris always wear glasses?”

“Blind as a bat without ’em, I think,” the woman answered. “At least, she always had two pairs, and I remember once when one pair was at the optician’s, she mislaid the other pair one day, and quite hurt herself walking into the edge of the chest of drawers in her room, she was that short-sighted.”

“So that even after she had been made up for her part she would still have worn her glasses up to the moment of going on the stage?” said Mrs. Bradley.

“I doubt whether she could see to get on to the stage up the steps at the side without them,” said the woman. “She’d have handed them to someone in the wings, I shouldn’t wonder, ready to put on again as she came off.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Yes. Thank you. I think I’ll go to bed. Breakfast at nine o’clock, please.”

“Why, but that’ll make you late for school, won’t it?” asked the woman.

“I am not teaching at the school to-morrow,” replied Mrs. Bradley. She sighed. There was a boy in the Lower Third Commercial with, she felt certain, all the psychological peculiarities of the Emperor Caligula. She would have liked to study him.