“I’ll leave it to Gerda,” he thought to himself. “She’ll manage it somehow.”

His mind, however, remained all that morning, as he sat at his desk in the Grammar School fourth-form room, asking questions about Edward Longshanks, teasingly preoccupied with this encounter.

“She may not go there at all,” he thought. “It isn’t her way to go there in the morning. They’re so funny, those two, about their houses. Well, we must chance it and hope for the best!”

And then, as he enlarged to his class upon that formidable black sarcophagus in Westminster Abbey, with its grim inscription, the under-flow of his mind kept fretting against all the little incidents that had led to this annoying issue.