He was nothing if not careful and precise with regard to everything of a business kind.
Then she began asking herself the sort of rather futile questions people do ask themselves, when puzzled, and made uneasy by what seems an inexplicable occurrence.

How would Mark get to Darnaston by twelve o'clock to-day?
Surely he could only do so by starting before it was light, and motoring the whole way from London?
She gazed at the words "very private." What did they portend?
Quickly she examined her conscience.

No, she had done nothing--nothing which could have brought her into contact, even slightly, with the law.

Of course, she was well aware that Mark had never forgotten, even over all these years, the dreadful scrape into which she had got herself by going to those gambling parties in the pleasant, quiet, Jermyn Street flat where she and Varick had first become acquainted.

But that had been a sharp lesson, and one by which she had profited.
She next took a rapid mental survey of her family, all so much more respectable and prosperous than herself.