She had hit upon a solution at last. Until I should be qualified as a secretary and until she saw fit to admit publicly that she was going to write her memoirs, she gave me to understand that I was to offer no unsolicited information, but if I were pressed I was to say, quite truthfully, that I was studying to become the amanuensis of a writer whose name I was not at liberty to give, that she and I had met through Dr. McAllister and she had invited me to share her house which, in Hopestill’s absence, would be too lonely even for her. I was permitted to say I was from Chichester but almost all the rest of my background was to be obliterated from my memory. Quite understandably she did not want it known that my mother was in an asylum. No more did I. There was little danger of the fact coming to light, for the summer residents of Chichester did not move in Miss Pride’s circles nor anywhere near them, and the only link presenting any danger was Dr. Barker, who not only had a bad memory for names but was also opposed to gossip and would certainly never dream of repeating anything so banal as his sister’s report of Chichester’s insane woman.

Having set the hour for my début in her drawing-room, Miss Pride went on frankly to clarify her plans for me. I say “frankly,” but the word is inexact, for her confessions were so subtly put and she displayed so ambiguous a wit that it was only after I had left her and had gone to my own room after dinner that I realized how stark had been her projection of the future. She was mortally afraid of growing old; if she were to dodder into half-crazed and ludicrous senility, as both her father and her mother had done, she wanted a caretaker to silence her, to dissuade her from both the crabbed and the maudlin antics of old age. She feared blindness (she, whose eyes at seventy had never been fitted with glasses) and dreaded being deprived of reading and of walking. “I don’t fancy taking up phonograph records to amuse me at my age,” she said scornfully. She was not sure I was the right custodian for her; that, only time could tell, but she wished me to consider whether I should like to think of myself as permanently installed in her house, and she implied that I would not be forgotten in her will. I was grateful and happy at the prospect, even though it was impossible for me to imagine her so changed as to need the services of what amounted to a nursemaid. I told her that and she replied grimly, “My dear, we’re all fools before we’re fetched by the pale rider.”