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to sleep soundly that night so as not to be worried because he was late. Or so that she could not reveal his activity and so raise the alarm!
    “Yes,” she said, “I understand.” On the word the lights went low and another photograph appeared on the screen. But there was nothing horrific about this. It was the face of a pleasant-looking, rather wistful man, with a pale golden tan and silky fair hair, well-shaped lips which gave him a droll look. She had a vague feeling that the face was familiar, as a film star’s might be; but she could not place him.
    Someone she hadn’t heard before said: “That is Palfrey. Dr Stanislaus Alexander Palfrey.” He pronounced the first syllable of the surname as if the ‘a’ were in fact an ‘o’ and after a pause the man at the table pronounced it differently: “Pal, as in pal, frey. P a lfrey.”
    Suddenly, she knew who the man was. Her expression changed and her eyes lit up as she exclaimed: “I know who he is!”
    “Who is he, then?”
    “He’s the leader of a kind of Secret Service.”
    “Kind of?” the other asked sharply.
    “Yes. He—my husband was fascinated by him and often talked about him. I remember now. Bruce used to say: ‘Palfrey for Calamity’.” Still excited, she stared even more intently at the photograph, which was so good that the man Palfrey seemed to be alive. “Whenever the country’s been threatened with calamity, the world for that matter, this man Palfrey with his organisation has—”
    She stopped, abruptly, drawing in her breath so sharply that it hissed between her lips. Then, silence fell, utter and complete. The picture faded from the mirror and the lights went low. Gradually, her own breathing and that of the men sounded, but seemed to add to the silence, not to break it.
    At last, the man said: “Go on, Janey.”
    She closed her eyes, and said huskily: “Is The Project a cal—” She checked herself and went on: “Does Palfrey think The Project a calamity?”
    “I have no doubt that he does,” the man answered. “And it would be, for him and for his outworn concepts of human society. What Palfrey and his friends, what the governments of the world don’t understand, is that today’s world is outworn.”
    Across his words came another voice, one she hadn’t heard before; a deep and resonant voice which seemed to come from about the man’s head although no one was there.
    “Stop there, Ramon.”
    The man with the lean features and the thin lips broke off and said quickly: “At once, sir.”
    “Show Miss Wylie the other photographs.”
    “At once,” the man repeated; and he sounded as much in awe of the unseen speaker as Janey was.
    There were moments of silence before another, remarkably handsome, face appeared, but one with which she was not familiar. Quietly, a name was uttered, broken into syllables: “An-drom-o-vitch.” But it meant nothing to her. “Stefan An-drom-o-vitch,” the speaker intoned, and the name appeared on the mirror beneath the face. She was vaguely aware of having heard it before, and the fact that it was Russian suddenly reminded her.
    “Isn’t he a very big man? Palfrey’s friend or—or— deputy,” she burst out. “That’s it! His deputy.”
    “You are quite right,” Ramon said. “Did Carr ever mention him?”
    “No.”
    “Or Palfrey?”
    “I’ve told you – no.”
    “Or this woman?” asked Ramon, as the picture changed.
    The woman whose head and shoulders appeared on the mirror looked to be in her mid-thirties, but she might be forty. She was attractive, in a particularly English way: soft looking and wholesome. She had dark hair, groomed rather formally, as if she had come from the same hairdresser as Barbara Castle, a Cabinet minister in Britain for so long. She had blue eyes and full, well-shaped lips, rather a short nose with a short upper lip. She wore a dress with a shallow V at the neck and although the photograph was cut above the breast line there was a hint of a