There was another fact about Miss Pendarth, and one which much contributed to her importance even with the people who disliked and feared her:  she was the only inhabitant of the remote Surrey village who was in touch with the world of fashion and society—­who knew people whose “pictures are in the papers.”  Now and again, though more and more rarely as time went on, she would leave Rose Cottage to take part in some big family gathering of the important and prosperous clan to which, in spite of her own lack of means, she yet belonged, and with whom she kept in touch.  But she herself never entertained a visitor at Rose Cottage, for a reason of which she herself was painfully aware and which the more careless of those about her did not in the least realise.  This reason was that she was very, very poor.  Before the War, her little settled income had enabled her to live in comfort in a house which was her own.  But now, had not her one servant been friend as well as maid, she could not have gone on living in Rose Cottage; and during the last year, as Betty Tosswill perhaps alone had noticed, certain beautiful things, fine bits of good old silver, delicate inlaid pieces of furniture, and a pair of finely carved gilt mirrors, had disappeared from Rose Cottage.

The house was situated in the village street, with, however, a paved forecourt, in which stood two huge Italian oil jars gay from April to November with narcissi, tulips, or pink geraniums.  Miss Pendarth was proud of the fine old Sussex ironwork gate and railing which separated her domain from the village street.  The gate was exactly opposite the entrance to the churchyard, while at right angles stood the village post office.  From the windows of her drawing-room upstairs, the mistress of Rose Cottage was able to see a great deal that went on in the village of Beechfield.

Miss Pendarth’s appearance, as is so often the case with an elderly, unmarried Englishwoman of her class, gave no clue to her clever, decisive, and original character.  She had a thin, rather long mouth, what old-fashioned people call a good nose, and grey eyes, and she had kept the slight, rather stiff, figure of her girlhood.  She still wore her hair, which was only now beginning to turn really grey, braided in the way which had been becoming to her thirty years before.  The effect, if neat, was rather wig-like, and the one peculiar-looking thing about her appearance.  She always wore, summer and winter, a mannish-looking tailor-made coat and skirt, and a plainly cut flannel or linen shirt.  At night—­and she dressed each evening—­she alternated between two black dresses, the one a velvet dress gown, the other a sequin-covered satin tea-gown.