Free Through The Wall by Patricia Wentworth Page A

proceeded from some cause other than the opening and closing of her front door, she sat back in her chair and returned to the letter which she had been reading. It was from her niece, Ethel Burkett, whose husband was a bank manager at Birleton. Her three boys now attended the excellent grammar school in that town. After some preliminaries in which a recent illness of little Josephine’s was described—the one cherished girl, a good deal younger than the boys—she wrote:
    “When Dr. Anderson said sea air if possible, you can just imagine how I felt, because of course I could not see any way in which it could be contrived. And then, the next morning, there was Muriel Lester’s letter—you may remember I was at school with her. She had heard about Josephine. A cousin of hers has a flat in this building—Muriel wrote to me, and I was able to tell her about it before it got on to house-agents’ books, so they have always felt very grateful. Well, Muriel wrote so very kindly and said she and her husband were obliged to go over to the Channel Islands to settle up his mother’s estate—quite complicated under the old French law—and she wondered if I would care to occupy their house while they were away. They would not care to let, but would be glad not to leave it empty—really the number of burglaries is quite dreadful. It seemed like a direct answer to prayer, and I wired my grateful acceptance. She rang up last night after seven, and it is all fixed. John’s unmarried sister, Mabel, will come in and take full charge here. Josephine and I go south tomorrow.
    “Dearest Auntie, can you, will you, join us at Farne? It would be so delightful. Could you possibly shut the flat and bring Hannah? I cannot tell you what a comfort it would be. Farne is a small seaside place not very far from Ledstow but farther along the coast. I think you have friends in the neighbourhood…”
    There followed an address, details of trains, and the request that a reply should be sent by telegram.
    Since this had already been done, and an affectionate acceptance indicated, Miss Silver was able to continue her rereading of Mrs. Burkett’s letter without any sense of hurry. When she had finished she put it back in its envelope and bestowed the envelope in a drawer.
    Her client had still not arrived. She allowed her gaze to rest with pleasure upon the comfortable sitting-room of her flat in Montague Mansions. As always when her thoughts turned that way, they became penetrated with gratitude to the Providence, which had so blessed her work as to establish her in this modest comfort. When she left school to become a governess at the scanty salary then obtaining, she had had no other expectation than to work hard all her life in other people’s houses and in the end retire to some sordid back room. The contrast of this expectation with her pleasant four-roomed flat, served by a convenient lift and kept in spotless order by her faithful Hannah Meadows, never failed to stir her deepest feelings.
    She sat there, her neat mousy hair arranged in a deep curled fringe very competently controlled by a net, her small slight person arrayed in a dress of olive-green wool made high to the chin by means of a cream net front with a collar supported by small strips of whalebone after the manner of her Edwardian youth. There was an old-fashioned gold chain about her neck from which depended a sizable locket upon which the initials of her parents, long deceased, were entwined in high relief.
    The events which had led her to abandon what she herself called the scholastic profession for the much more lucrative work of private detection had long ago receded into the quite distant past. Her comfortable room was a subject for present gratitude. She considered it, as she always did, with approval. The carpet was getting shabby, but everyone’s carpets were shabby now, and the really worn edge was well hidden by the bookcase. The affair of Lady Portington’s pearls had