The Lions Share | Page 7

hands in the lap of
her spotted pale-blue dress, faintly and sadly smiling.

Audrey burst out:
"Miss Ingate, what can I do? I must do something. What can I do?"
Miss Ingate shook her head, and put her lips tightly together, while
mechanically smoothing the sides of her grey coat.
"I don't know," she said. "It beats me."
"Then _I'll_ tell you what I can do!" answered Audrey firmly,
wriggling somewhat nearer to her along the floor. "And what I shall
do."
"What?"
"Will you promise to keep it a secret?"
Miss Ingate nodded, smiling and showing her teeth. Her broad polished
forehead positively shone with kindly eagerness.
"Will you swear?"
Miss Ingate hesitated, and then nodded again.
"Then put your hand on my head and say, 'I swear.'"
Miss Ingate obeyed.
"I shall leave this house," said Audrey in a low voice.
"You won't, Audrey!"
"I'll eat my hand off if I've not left this house by to-morrow, anyway."
"To-morrow!" Miss Ingate nearly screamed. "Now, Audrey, do reflect.
Think what you are!"
Audrey bounded to her feet.

"That's what father's always saying," she exploded angrily. "He's
always telling me to examine myself. The fact is, I know too much
about myself. I know exactly the kind of girl it is who's going to leave
this house. Exactly!"
"Audrey, you frighten me. Where are you going to?"
"London."
"Oh! That's all right then. I am relieved. I thought perhaps you waited
to come to my house. You won't get to London, because you haven't
any money."
"Oh, yes, I have. I've got a hundred pounds."
"Where?"
"Remember, you've sworn.... Here!" she cried suddenly, and drawing
her hand from behind her back she most sensationally displayed a
crushed roll of bank-notes.
"And who did you get those from?"
"I didn't get them from anybody. I got them out of father's safe. They're
his reserve. He keeps them right at the back of the left-hand drawer,
and he's so sure they're there that he never looks for them. He thinks
he's a perfect model, but really he's careless. There's a duplicate key to
the safe, you know, and he leaves it with a lot of other keys loose in his
desk. I expect he thought nobody would ever dream of guessing it was
a key of the safe. I know he never looked at this roll, because I've been
opening the safe every day for weeks past, and the roll was always the
same. In fact, it was dusty. Then to-day I decided to take it, and here
you are! He finished himself off yesterday, so far as I'm concerned,
with the business about the punt."
"But do you know you're a thief, Audrey?" breathed Miss Ingate,
extremely embarrassed, and for once somewhat staggered by the
vagaries of human nature.

"You seem to forget, Miss Ingate," said Audrey solemnly, "that Cousin
Caroline left me a legacy of two hundred pounds last year, and that I've
never seen a penny of it. Father absolutely declined to let me have the
tiniest bit of it. Well, I've taken half. He can keep the other half for his
trouble."
Miss Ingate's mouth stood open, and her eyes seemed startled.
"But you can't go to London alone. You wouldn't know what to do."
"Yes, I should. I've arranged everything. I shall wear my best clothes.
When I arrive at Liverpool Street I shall take a taxi. I've got three
addresses of boarding-houses out of the Daily Telegraph, and they're
all in Bloomsbury, W.C. I shall have lessons in shorthand and
typewriting at Pitman's School, and then I shall get a situation. My
name will be Vavasour."
"But you'll be caught."
"I shan't. I shall book to Ipswich first and begin again from there. Girls
like me aren't so easy to catch as all that."
"You're vehy cunning."
"I get that from mother. She's most frightfully cunning with father."
"Audrey," said Miss Ingate with a strange grin, "I don't know how I can
sit here and listen to you. You'll ruin me with your father, because if
you go I'm sure I shall never be able to keep from him that I knew all
about it."
"Then you shouldn't have sworn," retorted Audrey. "But I'm glad you
did swear, because I had to tell somebody, and there was nobody but
you."
Miss Ingate might possibly have contrived to employ some of that
sagacity in which she took a secret pride upon a very critical and urgent
situation, had not Mrs. Moze, with a white handkerchief wrapped round

her forehead, at that moment come into the room. Immediately the
study was full of neuralgia and eau-de-Cologne.
When Mrs. Moze and Miss Ingate at length recovered from the
tenderness of meeting each other after a separation of ten days or more,
Audrey had