CHAPTER VMrs. Belton, as she had promised, wrote to Captain Hornby and suggested that he should come down for a night or two and go through the things that were in the locked room upstairs. Captain Hornby gratefully accepted her offer and named a week-end when the Admiralty were giving him forty-eight hours off, which wouldn’t be till the middle of November. So Mrs. Belton noted the date in her engagement book and applied herself to her ordinary duties. All the working parties continued. Mrs. Updike, except for the fortnight when she had her arm in a sling owing to falling off a ladder on which she was looking round her attic with a torch to see if she could see any of the mice who had been ravaging her emergency store cupboard, knitted the leg of a seaboot stocking very creditably. It was
