But when she had woken and thought about the matter for a while, she decided that she had panicked unnecessarily. For the Satanists to keep a round-the-clock watch on her, they would need to employ a whole team of clairvoyants, and surely that was rating her importance to them much too high? To suppose that when anyone was about to betray their secrets an occult alarm bell rang to inform them of it was hardly credible; and, if they did have some such telepathic control, why should they have let her go on for several minutes describing the temple, its congregation and the things she had seen happen in it, before stopping her? On top of that the idea that they had the power temporarily to paralyse her fingertips from a distance seemed altogether too fantastic. The truth of the matter must be that she had simply been careless in taking the glass, and the fact that she had dropped it just as she was on the point of telling Barney about the black imp had been no more than a coincidence.

Much comforted by this logical banishing of her overnight fears, while she lay in her bath she sought again for some interest to occupy her mind now that she had abandoned her crusade to bring Teddy's murderer to justice, and some weeks must elapse before she could restore her old appearance to a point when she could take up once more, without embarrassment, with the people they had known.

The modelling work on which she had started only recently had, as yet, brought her few new acquaintances. It would bring more in time, but she knew that the majority of the men in the so-called 'rag' trade regarded the models they employed only as dummies to display clothes on, and the girls themselves, enjoying a much higher than average standard of good looks, all had either husbands or numerous boy-friends, who kept them fully occupied.

The previous night she had resigned herself to having lost Barney and had not been able to make up her mind if she was glad or sorry. Despite her long nurtured grievance against him, while in his company she enjoyed his gay, intelligent conversation and, subconsciously, was still strongly attracted to him physically. To know that she would not now have the satisfaction of making him fall for her, then being thoroughly beastly to him, was a sad disappointment; but she tried to console herself with the thought that two wrongs did not make a right, so perhaps it was as well that her plan to avenge herself on him had been nipped in the bud.