The first to appear was a tall, handsome, bad-tempered-looking girl.  She spoke first.

“It’s a damned shame of them to keep us waiting like this.”

She propped herself up against Anthony’s wall and smouldered there in her dark, sullen beauty.

“We were here at six sharp.”

“When they know we were told not to let on where we meet.”

“We’re led into a trap,” said a grey-haired woman.

“I say, who is Dorothea Harrison?”

“She’s the girl who roped Rosalind in.  She’s all right.”

“Yes, but are her people all right?”

“Rosalind knows them.”

The grey-haired woman spoke again.

“Well, if you think this lane is a good place for a secret meeting, I don’t.  Are you aware that the yard of `Jack Straw’s Castle’ is behind that wall?  What’s to prevent them bringing up five or six coppers and planting them there?  Why, they’ve only got to post one ’tee at the top of the lane, and another at the bottom, and we’re done.  Trapped.  I call it rotten.”

“It’s all right.  Here they are.”

Dorothea Harrison and Rosalind Jervis came down the lane at a leisured stride, their long coats buttoned up to their chins and their hands in their pockets.  Their I gestures were devoid of secrecy or any guile.  Each had a joyous air of being in command, of being able to hold up the whole adventure at her will, or let it rip.

Rosalind Jervis was no longer a bouncing, fluffy flapper.  In three years she had shot up into the stature of command.  She slouched, stooping a little from the shoulders, and carried her pink face thrust forward, as if leaning from a platform to address an audience.  From this salience her small chin retreated delicately into her pink throat.

“Is Miss Maud Blackadder here?” she said, marshalling her six.

The handsome girl detached herself slowly from Anthony’s wall.

“What’s the point,” she said, “of keeping us hanging about like this—­”

“Till all our faces are known to the police—­”

“There’s a johnnie gone in there who can swear to me.  Why didn’t you two turn up before?” said the handsome girl.

“Because,” said Dorothea, “that johnnie was my father.  He was pounding on in front of us all up East Heath Road.  If we’d got here sooner I should have had to introduce you.”

She looked at the six benevolently, indulgently.  They might have been children whose behaviour amused her.  It was as if she had said, “I avoided that introduction, not because it would have been dangerous and indiscreet, but because it would have spoiled your fun for you.”

She led the way into the garden and the house and through the hall into the schoolroom.  There they found eleven young girls who had come much too soon, and mistaking the arrangements, had rung the bell and allowed themselves to be shown in.

The schoolroom had been transformed into a sort of meeting hall.  The big oblong table had been drawn across one end of it.  Behind it were chairs for the speakers, before it were three rows of chairs where the eleven young girls sat scattered, expectant.