There was no mistaking her or her type. I knew them well, those older, anxious women who kept strictly to themselves, away from the gossip, the surreptitious manicures, and even the shampoos in the rest rooms. They are divided between a conviction that the business could not get along without them and a terror that it will; and Miss Connor was true to type.

She did not even lunch with the others. I followed her when she walked stolidly around a corner and entered a small teashop. There she took a table to herself and ordered coffee and doughnuts, chewing them deliberately when they came, with teeth obviously not her own. I let the coffee get in its work before I moved over to her table.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “But I think I saw you in the Atlantic Company’s office the other day.”

She eyed me. I had purposely worn the shabbiest things I had, but she was suspicious, as Jim had prophesied.

“Newspaperwoman?” she asked curtly.

“No, I wish I were. I’m looking for a job.”

I told her where I had been, and her suspicion slowly died. She spent ten minutes telling me that I’d better bleach my hair and make up my face, and at the end I picked up my cue.

“I don’t bother with bosses,” I said shortly. “There’s no luck in it. Look at what’s-her-name who ran away with this Morgan man who was murdered not long ago. She got a raw deal if I ever heard of one.”

I was afraid I had been too abrupt, but as our local tabloid had already featured that story she merely shrugged.

“That’s what I mean,” she said savagely. “She was a blonde, and look what it got her! I knew her,” she added, and then shut up like a clam, as though she had said too much. I did not dare to push the subject, and I was still eating the slice of lemon meringue pie which had been a staple among the girls when I was working when she got up abruptly and left. She hesitated before she went, however. Then she left a dime beside her plate, and the waitress later viewed it with amazement.

“So the old sourpuss loosened up,” she said.

“I imagine every dime counts.”

“It counts with me too,” she observed and slipped it into her pocket.

There seemed to be nothing more I could do that day, so I went home. Bessie had not come back, and one of the housemaids reported that she had taken a suitcase with her. But Bessie had always lived her own life at the Cloisters, and if I thought about it at all it was that she meant to spend the night in town.

It was still early, so I called up Lydia. After all, Miss Connor’s statement that the Weston girl had been a blonde was at least interesting. But when Audrey answered the telephone her voice was sharp. “Sorry,” she said. “You can’t talk to Mother. She’s not well.”