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else, and I stand on me rights and no nonsense, and so I tells the governor from the start.”
    “Is Mr. Merritt and exacting master, then?”
    “Naow ! ” said Shorty contemptuously. “Wouldn’t ’ave been with ’im all this time of the ’ad been. ’Course, his affliction makes him tetchy at times, but I don’t take no notice of that . ”
    “You’ve been with him ever since he became blind?”
    “Yes—and before.”
    “How did it happen?” Emily asked impulsively. The darkness and the snow had shut them into a little world of their own, and it no longer seemed difficult to ask questions of the unfriendly Shorty.
    “Something blew up in his face. I ask you—grown men playing about with stinks like a lot of kids!”
    “Do you mean a chemical experiment?”
    “Something of the sort, I suppose. Always messing about with stinks in that laboratory where he worked.”
    “What was his job?”
    “Research chemist, I believe they calls it. Very clever, Mr. Merritt was said to be. Still advises ’em when called upon. Writing a book, too, about his discoveries. Hope you’ll be able to make head nor tail to it better than wot I can. You don’t look very bright to me, but nor more did the others.”
    “I don’t imagine it’s a matter of doing any more than taking dictation,” said Emily with more assurance than she felt. Miss Pink had not mentioned that techn i cal knowledge might, be required in her secretarial duties, but neither had she touched on the nature of Mr. Merritt’s work or the cause of his accident.
    Emily was suddenly filled with a sense of her own inadequacy. Miss Pink’s own half-expressed doubts returned to undermine her budding confidence. If others had failed before her, what chance had she, the least experienced of the agency’s many proficient young women, of holding down a job with an employer who she was now convinced must be exacting and hard to please?
    The road wound now across unbroken snowy wasteland. They had passed no human habitation for some time, and she could hear the sound of the rising wind as it piled the snow in ridges against the windscreen.
    “Is this Dartmoor?” Emily asked, and Shorty replied with a note of sardonic pleasure:
    “Yes, this is the moor. Picked a cushy spot for a gaol, didn’t they? Might as well be buried, as I tell the governor. That ’ s what he wanted, he said, when the old man died and left him the place.”
    “You don’t like it?”
    “Naow, ’tain’t natural! Give me London and the crowds on a Saturday night and the stink of fish and chips and the four ale bar. Still, it takes all sorts to make a world.”
    Emily had not taken to Shorty in their brief acquaintance but she found herself touched by the tough little cockney’s loyalty. He must be genuinely attached to his master, she thought, to share in a voluntary exile and fear for the continued safety of his job .
    “And the little girl? Does she mind the loneliness, too?” she asked.
    “Miss Alice? Well, it’s always been ’er ’ome, see? Anyways, she’s a queer kid—no telling what she thinks. Mr . Carey adopted her in the first place so she’s never properly belonged nowhere in a manner of speaking.”
    “Mr. Carey?”
    “The old gentleman wot left the governor the place and his money. The kid was thrown in, too.”
    “Poor little girl,” said Emily softly, reminded of her own childhood. “It isn’t very nice not to be wanted.”
    “You’re a queer one,” observed Shorty, and added with sudden shrewdness: “Shouldn’t wonder if that Miss Pink ain’t trying out a new line. Loving kindness and fond ’earts—cor, it makes you sick!”
    “Why should fond hearts make you sick?” demanded Emily with spirit . “Better than no heart at all, I would have thought.”
    “Only there ain’t no such thing in females, see?” said Shorty crushingly. “Mr. Merritt ’ad ’is basinful with that Miss La rn e five years ago. Not likely to be caught again with the same