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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Ethel Lina White's "The Third Eye" presents a masterful blend of psychological suspense and gothic intrigue, immersing readers in a narrative suffused with tension and mystery. White utilizes a distinctive literary style characterized by vivid imagery and detailed character development, drawing readers into the strained emotional landscape of her protagonist. Set against the brooding backdrop of a secluded mansion, the plot intricately weaves themes of paranoia and supernatural phenomena, ultimately challenging the boundaries of reality and perception in a manner that resonates with the literary trends of the early 20th century. As a pioneer of the mystery genre, Ethel Lina White's works often reflect her keen interest in the complexities of human psychology and societal norms. The author, who gained recognition in a male-dominated literary landscape, infused her stories with strong female characters facing adversities that mirrored the broader struggles of women during her time. This depth of experience and observation perhaps serves as a catalyst for the haunting experiences that unfold in "The Third Eye." Readers seeking an evocative tale that combines supernatural elements with psychological depth will find "The Third Eye" to be an essential addition to their literary repertoire. With its masterful prose and intense suspense, the novel not only captivates but also invites reflection on the interplay between perception and reality, making it a compelling read for enthusiasts of the genre. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Third Eye
Table of Contents
Introduction
In The Third Eye, Ethel Lina White explores how peril germinates in the gap between what a vigilant mind perceives and what an orderly society is prepared to admit, turning heightened awareness into both a safeguard and a snare, as everyday routines seem to conceal patterns of malice, trust is tested by small ambiguities that accumulate into dread, and the very act of noticing—of cultivating a figurative third eye—becomes the catalyst that isolates the observer even as it is the only means of staying safe, within a community that prizes harmony over alarm.
A psychological-suspense novel by British crime writer Ethel Lina White, The Third Eye was first published during the 1930s, amid the interwar Golden Age of crime fiction. While contemporaries often centered elaborate puzzles, White’s work tilts toward menace arising from ordinary life, where social rituals and respectable facades can mask danger. The book is grounded in a familiar, everyday milieu rather than exotic or sensational settings, and its tensions grow from proximity, observation, and interpersonal strain. Read within its period, it reflects a culture negotiating stability and uncertainty, attentive to the anxiety that can seep into orderly spaces when certainty is in short supply.
Without revealing its turns, the novel begins in a world that looks intact and intelligible, then tunes the reader’s attention to disquieting details that do not quite fit. From the title onward, it signals a fascination with heightened perception: noticing the unnoticed, reading subtext, interrogating coincidence. As the narrative tightens, the protagonist’s vigilance becomes both method and burden, pressing them to distinguish between intuition and fear while others urge composure. The story thus offers a suspense experience built less on spectacle than on the friction between what seems safe and what may be secretly hostile, drawing the reader into complicity with watchfulness.
White’s style privileges texture and tempo: clear, unfussy prose, a controlled release of information, and scene work that turns everyday objects and habits into sources of query. Small choices—pauses, glances, a misplaced item—acquire weight through repetition and context, creating a steady thrum of uncertainty rather than abrupt shocks. The mood is claustrophobic without being gothic, and the atmosphere is contemporary to its publication moment, where good manners and institutional procedures are both comfort and constraint. Readers attuned to psychological nuance will find the suspense keyed to perception and inference, guided by an author with a keen ear for social temperature.
At its core, The Third Eye probes how people validate truth: whose testimony counts, what evidence suffices in polite society, and how reputations can shelter harm or crush dissent. It considers the ethics of suspicion—when to trust a hunch, when to demand proof—and the cost of vigilance for those who refuse to look away. The title invites metaphoric readings about intuition and surveillance, but the book stays close to lived experience: misunderstandings, near-misses, and pressures to smooth over discomfort. Power, hierarchy, and credibility shape outcomes, suggesting that danger can be less a sudden intrusion than a slow, cumulative misalignment.
That preoccupation feels strikingly current. In an age saturated with information and competing narratives, the difficulty of deciding what to believe, and how strongly to act on incomplete signals, is as urgent as ever. The novel’s attention to social coercion—polite disbelief, reputational risk, institutional self-protection—echoes contemporary debates about accountability and the emotional labor of being taken seriously. Readers may recognize the draining calculus of whether to speak, escalate, or wait, and the way delays can close options. The result is a period piece that resonates beyond its moment, illuminating how safety depends on both perception and collective willingness to heed it.
For newcomers to Ethel Lina White, whose The Wheel Spins later inspired The Lady Vanishes, The Third Eye offers a representative introduction to her brand of civilized unease: a careful, quietly incisive thriller in which the everyday turns treacherous under close inspection. It rewards patient reading, inviting you to weigh gestures, examine motives, and test hypotheses alongside its alert central figure, all without sacrificing accessibility or narrative drive. As a work of interwar suspense, it bridges classic crime traditions and modern psychological thrillers, and it leaves behind questions about seeing clearly—what it reveals, what it costs, and why it matters.
Synopsis
A young woman accepts a post at an elite girls’ school, eager to prove herself in a community that prides itself on tradition and excellence. From the first day, she notices a charged atmosphere beneath the polished surface: rules are rigid, routines exacting, and reputations closely guarded. Looming over the assembly hall is a circular window the pupils call “the third eye,” a feature that seems to watch everything and everyone. As the newcomer learns her duties, she senses that visibility and secrecy coexist in uneasy balance, and that the school’s celebrated discipline may also conceal private fears and unspoken tensions.
Introduced to the headmistress and a faculty of strong personalities, she encounters a hierarchy that rewards loyalty and discretion. The head is charismatic, exacting, and acutely aware of public perception, while senior staff uphold standards that brook little dissent. Colleagues offer polite warnings about “how things are done,” and girls intuit what should never be discussed aloud. The newcomer is encouraged to blend in, avoid questions, and maintain the school’s image. Yet small irregularities draw her attention: curious omissions in records, oddly synchronized movements, and conversations that cease when she approaches. Observation becomes her safeguard—and, increasingly, a responsibility.
Rumors spread among pupils about inexplicable events: mislaid belongings, unexplained noises, and fleeting figures in off-limits corridors. Minor accidents, brushed aside as carelessness, carry patterns she cannot ignore. The school’s official explanations are brisk and tidy, but the girls’ whispers tell a different story. She begins to chart where incidents occur, when lights fail, and who was present. A sympathetic colleague, fond of the school yet uneasy, shares guarded insights, while a more authoritarian mistress seems intent on quashing talk. The newcomer’s questions sharpen, but so do cautions to remain silent. The third eye—architectural and metaphorical—feels increasingly relevant.
As preparations build for a high-profile event—one that will draw benefactors, parents, and inspectors—the institution tightens its routine. The newcomer is assigned extra responsibilities, which grant her access to storerooms, attics, and stages behind public scenes. There she overhears clipped exchanges about timetables and "contingencies," glimpses keys changing hands, and notices how certain doors never seem quite locked. Among the students, bravado mixes with anxiety, and the nickname “third eye” becomes shorthand for the sense of being constantly monitored. The pressure to present perfection intensifies, and with it the stakes, should any flaw appear in the carefully managed facade.
An incident of greater gravity jolts the school, threatening to draw outside scrutiny. Administrative reactions are swift, framing events as unfortunate but contained. The official narrative emphasizes unity and decorum; students are reminded of loyalty, staff of duty. Privately, the newcomer registers discrepancies: a timeline that shifts, testimony that subtly aligns, and evidence moved before anyone admits it existed. She resolves to proceed cautiously, balancing her position with the need to protect vulnerable pupils. Rather than challenge authority directly, she begins a quiet inquiry, mapping connections between incidents and identifying who benefits from silence—and who might be driving the cycle of fear.
Exploring the school’s hidden architecture, she finds narrow passages and vantage points that command wide views of classrooms and halls. The circular window—“the third eye”—is not simply ornament; it offers a line of sight that could be used to observe unobserved. This discovery reframes the pattern of events: accidents may be staged, the timing orchestrated, and the sense of omnipresence deliberately cultivated. Suspicions shift among a small group with motive and opportunity, but the boundaries between protector and threat blur. Friends become reticent, and even well-meaning advice seems double-edged. The newcomer’s growing understanding is matched by rising personal risk.
Themes of ambition and institutional pride come to the fore. The school’s pursuit of prestige, scholarships, and patronage encourages careful stagecraft—sometimes at the expense of candor. Decisions are justified as preserving the whole, while individual distress is minimized as temporary or trivial. The newcomer, mindful of her precarious standing, weighs the cost of speaking out against the duty of care she owes the girls. An ally withdraws under pressure, weak links are reinforced, and subtle intimidation appears as administrative routine. Her observations, however, coalesce into a coherent picture: someone is exploiting surveillance and secrecy to manipulate outcomes and manage reputations with ruthless precision.
As the grand event approaches, the newcomer prepares a measured plan to expose wrongdoing without imperiling innocents or inviting chaos. She secures corroboration, anticipates counterclaims, and times disclosures for a moment when denial will be most difficult. Shadowed by warnings and apparent coincidences, she tests locked spaces, tracks movements, and documents details that cannot be dismissed as gossip. Tension gathers in rehearsal rooms and corridors, where every whisper seems amplified by the school’s echoing architecture. The third eye’s gaze, once merely symbolic, now feels like an active instrument—one that may be turned back upon those who wield it.
The climax unfolds during a public occasion, when appearances matter most and control is paramount. Without revealing crucial outcomes, the confrontation forces hidden mechanisms into the light: surveillance repurposed as protection, authority checked by witness, and vulnerability transformed into agency. In the aftermath, roles are reassessed, and the institution must reckon with how its virtues enabled its vulnerabilities. The newcomer’s insight—that watchfulness can safeguard or endanger, depending on who looks and why—captures the novel’s core message. Beneath respectability, peril can thrive; only honest attention can dispel it. The school continues, changed by exposure, its third eye reclaimed for transparency rather than fear.
Historical Context
Ethel Lina White’s The Third Eye is set in interwar England, plausibly in the mid-to-late 1930s, within the cloistered world of a private girls’ school in a provincial town. The setting reflects a society still recovering from the First World War and negotiating the social strains of the Great Depression. Everyday life is marked by electric lighting, telephones, buses, and trains, yet also by entrenched class distinctions and strict institutional hierarchies. The school functions as a microcosm of British order and authority, with a headmistress wielding near-sovereign power, staff precariously employed, and pupils governed by etiquette and surveillance—an atmosphere saturated with contemporary anxieties about control, reputation, and moral discipline.
Women’s education and the teaching profession form the historical axis most directly shaping the novel’s world. By the 1920s and 1930s, women constituted the majority of elementary teachers in England and Wales, a legacy of nineteenth-century reforms that created girls’ high schools through bodies like the Girls’ Public Day School Trust (founded 1872) and the Headmistresses’ Association (1874). Policy shifts in the interwar years—especially the Fisher Education Act of 1918 (raising the school-leaving age to 14), the Hadow Reports (notably 1926), and the Education Act of 1936 (which planned to raise the leaving age to 15 in 1939)—reshaped curricula, grading, and school organization. Alongside these reforms, inspection by His Majesty’s Inspectors and local education authorities standardized expectations and intensified documentary oversight. Yet many women teachers remained vulnerable to the widespread “marriage bar” imposed by numerous education authorities during the 1920s–1930s, compelling resignation upon marriage and reinforcing economic precarity and institutional dependency. Prestigious girls’ schools—whether day schools or boarding establishments—maintained rigid hierarchies: headmistress, senior staff, housemistresses, junior teachers, domestic servants, and scholarship pupils, all stratified by status and pay. Such schools prized reputation, ceremony, and discipline, often adopting uniforms and codes that mirrored the broader culture’s preference for ordered ranks. These historical conditions illuminate the novel’s portrayal of a headmistress’s expansive authority, the fragility of a female teacher’s position, and the subtle, sometimes coercive, mechanisms of supervision. The title’s suggestion of heightened vigilance resonates with interwar pedagogical trends emphasizing psychological insight, tests, and observation within institutions that could both nurture and oppress. In The Third Eye, the school’s social architecture—rooted in real educational policies, employment practices, and inspection regimes—creates the credible stage for conflicts over power, security, and the credibility of women’s perceptions.
The Great Depression in Britain (1929–1932) produced mass unemployment—exceeding three million in 1932—and austerity measures that shaped the lives of staff and families connected to schools. The National Government formed in 1931 instituted the Means Test for unemployment assistance, while the Special Areas Act of 1934 targeted distressed regions such as South Wales, Tyneside, and Clydeside. The Jarrow March of October 1936 dramatized the plight of jobless communities. In the novel’s milieu, these conditions are mirrored in anxieties about job loss, reputation, and class mobility: junior teachers, servants, and scholarship pupils navigate an environment where economic insecurity heightens conformity and fear of scandal within the school.
Anxieties about authoritarian politics in the 1930s also echo through the book’s emphasis on discipline and surveillance. The British Union of Fascists, founded by Oswald Mosley in 1932, staged highly choreographed rallies, culminating in notorious violence at Olympia on 7 June 1934. Anti-fascist resistance peaked at the Battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936, and Parliament responded with the Public Order Act (1936), banning political uniforms. While not a political novel, The Third Eye’s depiction of uniforms, rules, and an all-seeing authority within a closed institution reflects contemporary debates over regimentation, obedience, and the dangers of charismatic control in British public life.
Interwar policing and forensic modernization created a culture attuned to detection and scandal. New Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department refined techniques established since fingerprinting’s official adoption in 1901, while prominent pathologists such as Sir Bernard Spilsbury shaped public understanding of scientific evidence through high-profile cases, including the Ruxton murders (1935). Sensational crime reporting in the Daily Mail and News of the World amplified public interest. These developments inform the novel’s atmosphere: suspicion circulates through staff rooms and corridors, and the threat of exposure—medical, legal, or press—makes the school’s guardians of respectability vigilant, sometimes at the expense of truth and individual well-being.
The era’s fascination with spiritualism and psychical research offers another historical lens on the book’s title and motifs. The Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882) and public figures like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle popularized séances in the 1920s, while skeptics such as Harry Houdini contested them. In the late 1930s, investigator Harry Price’s inquiries into Borley Rectory—widely publicized from 1937—renewed interest in the supernatural. Meanwhile, J. B. Rhine’s work on extra-sensory perception at Duke University (notably published in 1934) lent parapsychology a quasi-scientific gloss. The Third Eye engages this climate by invoking heightened perception and the tension between rational modernity and the allure of the unseen.
Transformations in communication and mobility subtly undergird the novel’s world. The General Post Office expanded telephone services and automatic exchanges during the 1920s–1930s, while buses and railways connected provincial towns to metropolitan centers. Radio broadcasting by the BBC (established 1922) synchronized news, gossip, and national concerns. These technologies condensed distance yet also created new forms of miscommunication and exposure; a single misplaced call or delayed letter could alter reputations. In the school setting of The Third Eye, this infrastructure enables swift rumor, bureaucratic oversight, and the possibility of external scrutiny, reinforcing a culture where appearances must be managed and secrets are difficult to contain.
As social and political critique, The Third Eye scrutinizes the authoritarian potential of interwar institutions, exposing how gendered employment practices and class hierarchies can silence vulnerable individuals. The school’s obsession with order and honor mirrors a society anxious about scandal and stability amid depression and ideological conflict. By situating a woman professional within an environment governed by inspection, marriage bars, and reputational fear, the book challenges the marginalization of female testimony and intuition. Its evocation of surveillance, uniforms, and disciplinary rituals interrogates the period’s appetite for control, suggesting that the defense of prestige often eclipsed justice, empathy, and the safeguarding of the young.
The Third Eye
PART ONE: THERE—
I. — ROUNDABOUT
FROM the first, Professor Freeman was reluctant to let his young sister-in-law—Caroline—accept the post of games mistress at the Abbey School.
He rubbed his heel over his instep, scratched his cheek, bit his nails, and generally ran through the gamut of nervous mannerisms for which he scolded his two small sons. When the practical sex—as represented by his wife and sister-in-law—pressed him for some logical objection, he was unable to justify his misgivings.
"It's such a roundabout business[1]," he complained to his wife. "You broadcast the fact that our Beloved Fool"—he smiled affectionately at Caroline—"wants a job, and some one who's staying in Wiltshire goes to tea with some one who can put her in touch with some one who can offer her work."
"But it's a blinking school," declared Caroline, who was studying the prospectus. "Look at the list of staff. They all have degrees."
As the non-brilliant member of a family who appeared to acquire academic honours as easily as the average person solves a crossword puzzle, she had a reverence for alphabetical tags. But the Professor merely wrinkled up his nose.
"If you'd coached as many thick-headed students as I have," he said, "you'd give the credit—if any—to their unlucky tutors. And I fail to see the good of it in these over-specialised days."
"Don't be reactionary," remarked his wife, Lesley Freeman, M.A. "Tell us instead exactly what you have against the school."
"Well, to begin with, it's a private school," grumbled the Professor. "I know from personal experience that these places can be hotbeds of jealousy and scandal."
"Don't reason by analogy," chimed in Caroline, eager to prove that even she possessed a vocabulary. "You don't know how I yearn to earn my first salary. I shall spend it going to Switzerland to the Winter Sports."
"I suppose I can't stop you. But there's plenty of room for you here."
Caroline avoided meeting her sister's eye, for the flat had only two bedrooms. She herself had slept for eleven weeks on a short divan in the dining-room. As the period included a heat-wave, and as she was tall and supercharged with energy, the experience had proved slightly trying.
"You're angels," she murmured. "But I must get a job."
Lesley backed her up, for she was intelligent as well as clever. A genuine student, and more interested in textbooks than facial charts, she knew she could not compete with Caroline's bloom at the breakfast-table. Seeing that he was beaten, the Professor gave in.
"You must first let me make some inquiries," he stipulated. "I seem to recollect that Hawkins knows a man who has a daughter at the Abbey School."
"You're going to ask some one who knows some one," jeered Caroline. "A bit roundabout. Stop quacking, Donald Duck. I'm going to find my most flattering photograph to send to Mrs. Nash."
"I feel worried about her," declared the Professor when she had burst out of the room. "She's such a babe."
"Babe, my eye," was the elegant retort of Lesley Freeman, M.A.
Checked in his lapse into sentiment, the Professor went to his club, where he ran his quarry to earth in the reading-room. Mr. Hawkins, who was headmaster of a preparatory school, bore a character for scrupulous impartiality. Although no one else was present, he was obviously uneasy about conversation in a place dedicated to silence.
"Yes," he agreed, speaking in a whisper. "Major Buck has a daughter at the Abbey School. He told me recently that he was satisfied with her progress. She matriculated with honours."
"Good," commented the Professor. "Then I take it he would recommend the school?"
Mr. Hawkins weighed the question.
"He is sending his younger daughter elsewhere," he remarked.
"Any specific reason?"
"Nothing definite. Perhaps some dissatisfaction with the discipline. He made some vague mention about not approving of one woman having too much influence. That is positively all I can tell you."
Mr. Hawkins lapsed into inaudibility at the entrance of a member, and the Professor knew that the subject was closed. When he returned to the flat his womenfolk held an inquest on his findings.
"Of course the high-handed woman is Mrs. Nash," said Lesley. "Well—it's her own school."
"And the discipline wouldn't affect me," beamed Caroline. "It's a luminous thought that at last I shall give discipline—not receive it."
As the Professor continued to pull his chin his wife made a suggestion.
"Could you tackle the Major direct?"
"He's abroad. Besides, it's unnecessary, for the deduction is obvious. The school is evidently going down, but the Major thinks it will last his elder daughter's time."
"Mine, too," declared Caroline. "I only want a ref." But the Professor was far from satisfied.
"Before I give the Beloved Fool my blessing," he said, "I must know two things. First—why the games mistress left only three weeks after the beginning of the term; second—why Mrs. Nash didn't apply to an agency, in the usual way, for her successor."
"That can soon be settled," his wife told him. "Mrs. Gloucester is expected home this afternoon. So we'll go over there tonight after coffee."
Mrs. Gloucester was the friend who had been the intermediary in Caroline's interests—over afternoon tea drunk from pedigree China in a stately Wiltshire drawing-room. She was a kind-hearted lady and possessed a talent for benevolent manipulation. In this special case she was beaming over her success when she greeted the Professor and his wife that evening.
"I do hope Caroline will get the post," she said. "I spoke strongly in her favour. The personal recommendation counts for so much after an unlucky experience."
"What unlucky experience?" asked the Professor, pouncing on the admission.
"Oh, the other poor games mistress. She was found dead in bed. Heart failure."
While the Professor and his wife were expressing conventional horror, Mrs. Gloucester—unprompted—answered the second objection.
"But you know what rumour is. All sorts of ridiculous stories got about. So Mrs. Nash felt that if she applied to an agency after all the best mistresses were snapped up she'd be landed with some odd-come-short. She preferred to get a temporary coach, and look around. Then a Miss Yaxley-Moore, who has an administration post in the Abbey School, chanced to mention it in a letter to her half-sister in Wiltshire. She spoke about it casually when we were calling on her. I saw my chance—and leaped for it...Really, I think I ought to charge both sides a commission."
"But is Mrs. Nash prepared to consider Caroline, when she is such a roundabout acquisition?" queried the Professor, who was fishing for an opening.
"I stood Sponsor for her," replied Mrs. Gloucester modestly. "That is one advantage of being in a book of reference."
"And your hostess in Wiltshire—whose half-sister is at the school—is she also duly documented?" asked the Professor. He felt that this lady—as the unknown factor—was the most important link in the chain, so he was really relieved by Mrs. Gloucester's assurance.
"That goes without saying, or I should not have mentioned Caroline to her. Both she and her half-sister, Miss Yaxley-Moore, belong to those families that are older than the Peerage. She is one of the most influential ladies in the district. Of course, I saw her in her own background—a beautiful period house which has been in her family for generations."
She paused for a breath before she uttered the name which was loaded with such fateful significance for Caroline.
"Miss Bat, of Bat House."
Unfortunately the girl was at home in the flat coaching her nephews in the gentle art of boxing, while to the Professor and his wife it was of secondary importance, since the main question had been answered, and therefore not worthy of mention. When they returned, Caroline listened to their report with unexpected gravity.
"Don't you want to go?" asked the Professor hopefully.
"Of course," she replied. "Only—I've thought and thought about getting a job. I've wished—I've even prayed. And now at last it comes, through some one's death...It seems unlucky."
Perhaps it was even more unlucky that the Professor had not the gift of clair-audience, and so was unable to hear Mrs. Gloucester's remark to her husband that night.
"I felt so sorry for the poor dear Professor having his sister-in-law wished on him for so long that I was furious with myself for blurring out about the rumours connected with the other games mistress's death. Luckily, her sister took no notice, and the Professor was far too wise to raise any question."
"What were the rumours?" asked her husband sleepily.
"Oh, the usual hush-hush affair. The doctor had been attending her for heart-strain, so he was able to write a certificate...But the story got about that she had been frightened to death."
II. — THE OMEN
EVERYONE knew that Caroline was desperately eager to get a job; but no one knew that she nearly turned back at the gates of the Abbey School.
She always regarded herself as the family failure because of her inability to pass examinations. When her mother's death disclosed a financial crisis and her relatives had no option but to capitalise her skill at games, she writhed in secret humiliation. Her brother-in-law's enforced hospitality was another thorn in her flesh, since she was quite unaware of his admiration for his Beloved Fool.
He grew quite dejected in anticipation of her loss, for there was a clear daylight quality about her nature which appealed to him as much as the charm of youth and her vivid, attractive face. But he was also worried about her character, for her own sake.
Impulsive, warm-hearted and imprudent, she also possessed unusually rigid principles harnessed to an incapacity to accept compromise which he feared might send her crashing into disaster.
He tried to put her on her guard when they were having tea together in a dark, smoky café before she caught the local bus out to the Abbey School. Against her wish, he had insisted on coming with her to Plume—the old west-country cathedral town which was as far as she could travel by rail; but, now that their parting was near, she was only too glad of his company.
"I don't wish to quack," he told her, "but there is something I must say. It's this: Keep clear of every one your first term.[1q] Don't make friends—and, above all, don't make enemies. Steer clear of any quarrel. Don't be curious about other people's business, or you may find yourself drawn into an intrigue which will spin you round like the drum which shuffles the counterfoils in the Irish Sweep[2], and land you up somewhere where you least want to be."
"I promise," said Caroline soberly.
They were the sole patrons of the tea-room, and she was vaguely depressed by the drizzling rain on the window-panes and the empty clutter of chairs. As though he read her thoughts, the Professor tried to tempt her.
"Still time to change your mind," he said, "Come back to London with me."
"Quack, quack," she murmured mechanically as she looked at her watch. "It's time to go, darling Donald Duck."
She felt an actual pang, after she had climbed into the bus, to see him standing below her on the pavement.
"Shall I promise not to change my shirt until you come back?" he asked.
"No—promise not to change your tailor."
Pleased with the compliment to his new suit, the Professor grinned bashfully; but his smile faded as the bus began to move. Her face, too, was serious as she rolled through dingy utilitarian quarters of the ancient town, which smelt of petrol—over a stagnant green river—past the last villa—and then out into the twilit country, where owls hooted dismally in the woods and the white scuts of rabbits were dimly visible as they scampered amid clumps of bracken.
Her luggage had been sent out by the local carrier, so that the driver was able to drop her almost outside the gates of the school. As she covered the short distance to the lodge, something happened which filled her with horror.
As a rule she walked quickly, with her head erect and looking before her, as though she saw some one she loved standing at the end of a long, straight road. This special characteristic was to prove of vital importance at a future crisis of her life, but it was absent that night.
While she moved slowly and unwillingly, dragging her feet and with her eyes fixed upon the road, a dark object writhed across her path and disappeared into the long grass which bordered the ditch.
"A snake—and I nearly trod on it," she shuddered.
She was so unnerved by the incident that she was almost on the point of waiting for the first bus back to Plume, lest it should prove an omen of ill-fortune. But while she waited in the greenish gloom common-sense prevailed, reminding her that the reptile was probably but a harmless grass-snake and prodding her through the lodge gates and up the drive.
The Abbey was now represented only by a pile of ruins in the grounds, while the house was one of the stately homes of England, whose owner could afford the cost of its maintenance no longer. It was a huge biscuit-stucco erection, with a pillared portico and a double flight of stone steps leading up to an imposing entrance.
Caroline had to wait some time before her ring was answered. She stood forlornly gazing at beds of waterlogged dahlias and dripping laurels until the door was opened by a pleasant-faced young man-servant in a striped linen coat.
"I'm Miss Watts," she told him. "Mrs. Nash is expecting me."
As she spoke, she got the uneasy impression of the birth of a smile behind the man's eyes.
"This way, please," he said.
