“A choirboys’ picnic indeed,” came from Miss Viner. “Tommy Saunders and Albert Dykes ought to be left behind, and I shan’t subscribe to it unless they are. What those two boys think they are doing in church on Sundays I don’t know. Tommy sang, ‘O God, make speed to save us,’ and never opened his lips again, and if Albert Dykes wasn’t sucking a mint humbug, my nose is not what it is and always has been.”

“I know, they are awful,” agreed Katherine.

She opened her second letter, and a sudden flush came to her cheeks. Miss Viner’s voice in the room seemed to recede into the far distance.

When she came back to a sense of her surroundings Miss Viner was bringing a long speech to a triumphant termination.

“And I said to her, ‘Not at all. As it happens, Miss Grey is Lady Tamplin’s own cousin.’ What do you think of that?”