She attacked the plasticine vigorously.

Something rolled out on the table—then another something. Presently there was quite a heap.

Julia leaned back and gasped.

She stared and stared and stared…

Liquid fire, red and green and deep blue and dazzling white…

In that moment, Julia grew up. She was no longer a child. She became a woman. A woman looking at jewels…

All sorts of fantastic snatches of thought raced through her brain. Aladdin’s cave…Marguerite and her casket of jewels…(They had been taken to Covent Garden to hear Faust last week)…Fatal stones…the Hope diamond…Romance…herself in a black velvet gown with a flashing necklace round her throat…

She sat and gloated and dreamed…She held the stones in her fingers and let them fall through in a rivulet of fire, a flashing stream of wonder and delight.

And then something, some slight sound perhaps, recalled her to herself.

She sat thinking, trying to use her common sense, deciding what she ought to do. That faint sound had alarmed her. She swept up the stones, took them to the washstand and thrust them into her sponge bag and rammed her sponge and nail brush down on top of them. Then she went back to the tennis racquet, forced the plasticine back inside it, replaced the wooden top and tried to gum down the leather on top again. It curled upwards, but she managed to deal with that by applying adhesive plaster the wrong way up in thin strips and then pressing the leather on to it.

It was done. The racquet looked and felt just as before, its weight hardly altered in feel. She looked at it and then cast it down carelessly on a chair.

She looked at her bed, neatly turned down and waiting. But she did not undress. Instead she sat listening. Was that a footstep outside?

Suddenly and unexpectedly she knew fear. Two people had been killed. If anyone knew what she had found, she would be killed.

There was a fairly heavy oak chest of drawers in the room. She managed to drag it in front of the door, wishing that it was the custom at Meadowbank to have keys in the locks. She went to the window, pulled up the top sash and bolted it. There was no tree growing near the window and no creepers. She doubted if it was possible for anyone to come in that way but she was not going to take any chances.

She looked at her small clock. Half past ten. She drew a deep breath and turned out the light. No one must notice anything unusual. She pulled back the curtain a little from the window. There was a full moon and she could see the door clearly. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed. In her hand she held the stoutest shoe she possessed.

‘If anyone tries to come in,’ Julia said to herself, ‘I’ll rap on the wall here as hard as I can. Mary King is next door and that will wake her up. And I’ll scream—at the top of my voice. And then, if lots of people come, I’ll say I had a nightmare. Anyone might have a nightmare after all the things that have been going on here.’