544 ANGEL PAVEMENT

Turgis explained, "and they sent her up with it. We've
been having a good talk about all the business and ail
that."

"Quite so?" said Mrs. Pelumpton, affably, but with
dignity, as if the very presence of a strange member of
her own sex in the house, even though not in the same
room, made her put on a special manner, affable, digni-
fied, lady-like. "Perhaps the young lady would like a
cup of tea, with yourself—that is, if she cares to take us
as she finds us?"

"Thanks very much, Mrs. Pelumpton," cried Turgis.
"I'll go and ask her."

Miss Sellers was easily persuaded to abandon a pro-
jected visit to her cousin in Bartholomew Road, and
stayed to tea, during which she and Mrs. Pelumpton
discovered, after a great deal of elaborate cross-question-
ing, that Miss Sellers and her sister had actually stayed
for a week in a boarding-house at Clacton that had been
kept, three years before they went there, by Mrs.
Pelumpton's sister, whom therefore they had only
missed meeting by two years and ten months. Delighted
to discover once more they were living in a world so
small, so cosy, Miss Sellers and Mrs. Pelumpton were
very pleased with one another. After tea, when the
Pelumptons were out of the way, Turgis, though still
the same young man, without prospects, without hope,
actually went to the length of indulging in that mys-
terious badinage which is the signal of sexual attraction
and interest among the young inarticulate creatures of
this country. "What d'you mean?" they cried to one
another. "Oh, I don't mean what you mean!"

Then, at the end of half an hour or so of this: "Well,
I half promised to see a girl friend to-night."