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had much to enjoy and would not be hampered by guides other than their Baedekers and maps.
    Gwen did not offer to join them. The four had coffee together in the hotel lounge, but when Myra, Flo and Rose took up their handbags and cameras with purposeful glances at one another and a polite question to her, she shook her head, getting out a fresh cigarette to light from the stub she took from her lips. They left her sitting there, staring out of the window, making no sign even to those members of the tour who remarked upon her strange inertia as they passed her.
    â€œI can’t make out that young woman at all,” Myra said as they climbed the hill slowly towards the church. “Can you, Rose?”
    â€œNot really,” Mrs. Lawler answered. Her own thoughts were too fantastic to be shared.
    Until, in one of the darker recesses of the first church, she passed a stooping figure that she recognised. For a couple of seconds she thought of accosting him, but then recoiled from the impulse and passed on. This was helped by Flo, who asked her from behind where it was they expected to find certain of the famous Giotto paintings of the life of the Saint. When she had confirmed the answer from her guide book she looked round again, but Owen Strong had disappeared.
    He had been startled, waiting in his dark corner, to see Mrs. Lawler at all. Her exploit at the Colosseum, that he had admired as much as he deplored its success and his own consequent failure had, so Rollo had told him, certainly crippled the woman, if only temporarily. So he had judged it safe to have a word with Gwen in Assisi. He had no doubt she had got his note. Rollo never let him down, over simple little jobs of communication, especially as the bread-line journalist had been done out of an expected scoop, “Englishwoman falls at Colosseum” by the heroine of the episode from her hospital bed, or an obituary if that was the alternative.
    Yet she was here, no more crippled than the rest of that lot with their obvious arthritis, obesity and corns, he thought contemptuously, watching the mixed tourist crowd, waiting for Gwen.
    When she came at last, saw him, went to look at a picture near him, waited until his voice at her ear, as in the catacombs said quietly, “Go back to the entrance. I’ll join you outside,” he moved away at last and Mrs. Lawler, who had seen Gwen arrive, guessed the whole of the subsequent action, though she did not stay to watch it.
    The three friends enjoyed the frescoes in the second church, returned to buy postcards in the entrance of the first and then set off into the little town to look at the many shops full of Assisi embroidery worked upon cloths of many sizes and upon clothes for women and children. The patterns were charming, they decided, but the linen upon which they were embroidered was mostly rather poor and the threads uneven in the warp and weft so that the embroidery was not based, as it should be, on squares of counted threads but must have been worked upon a printed outline, quite another thing altogether.
    Flo declared she did not mind how they were done they were so pretty and bought a dress for a small niece. But Myra, who had made table mats for herself in the correct manner upon Irish linen, refused to buy, while Mrs. Lawler, whose legs were beginning to ache again, left her friends to walk slowly back to the coach, taking photographs on the way.
    When Gwen joined Owen at the door of the church he led her at once up a narrow street that came out behind the top end of the large car park. Here, almost hidden from every direction was the long black car she recognised. He unlocked it and motioned her inside. She recoiled from the oven heat of the interior.
    â€œGet in,” he insisted. “I want to talk to you.”
    She was repelled by this rough order.
    â€œYou can’t take that tone with me!” she cried. “And I’m not going to be roasted to suit your convenience, so