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respectful bow
     
    Then came my old professor. I had been right about him. He was of immense distinction, and he spent as much time at Cambridge as in the suite of rooms opening upon the manor lawn. He was Sir Alexander Romilly himself.
     
    He had evidently decided - for he knew almost as much of possible human beings as possible universes - that a fuss was being made about very little. He pointed out that Mr Howard-Wolferstan (no nonsense about calling me the accused) had offered him no violence whatever and had indeed - ho, ho! - engaged his sympathies by conversation. So far as his experience permitted him to judge, and unless he had been grossly deceived by outward appearances, he felt as sure of Mr Howard-Wolferstan’s loyalty as of his own.
     
    Loyalty? Well, I supposed it would be investigated, but I was so precious innocent and confident that I was startled when the word was openly mentioned. I fear I returned Sir Alexander’s little nod without the full courtliness which springs from an easy mind.
     
    I am not, I am quite sure, more Ecuadorian than English. But put it this way. I had been brought up in a country where a man of substance and family could do more or less as he liked, short of murder. Such eighteenth-century liberty was, of course, unthinkable in England; but the nearest thing to it was the charitable attitude adopted, before the war, to the peccadilloes of high-spirited but essentially honourable young men at the older universities. And that had been my chief experience of England - two years of school, four years at Oxford and a fifth as a gilded and irresponsible youth in London. Thus I was idiot enough to expect that my breaking into Moreton Intrinseca manor - in the absence of any evidence of theft or intended theft - would be treated as an eccentricity in the worst of taste, and that I should be let off with a tremendous lecture from the magistrates and a heavy fine. I had also, I fear - for youth in the Americas endures so easily - forgotten that I was thirty-seven not twenty-two.
     
    When I was called upon to tell my story, I put it very simply. I said that I had no witness except my father who was dead. He had told me that there was a considerable sum of money in the house - I claimed that it was gold coin and in a deed box, for I dared not weaken my story by saying I hadn’t the faintest notion what it was - but that the box was not in the attic where he said it would be found. I strenuously maintained that I had passed through the wing set apart for female scientists by the purest accident.
     
    The Crown had employed an eminent Q.C. to deal with me. He seemed a very ferocious iron-grey sledge-hammer to crack a harmless nut, but I supposed, uneasily, that his presence was just bureaucratic routine. He asked me whether I seriously expected my story to be believed. I answered that I did not and that, all the same, it was true. I rather hoped that he and the magistrates would suspect me of telling a gallant lie. Dr Cornelia was clear on my evidence and Peter’s of all possible complicity, but I might well have been enamoured of the intellectual in the green nightdress.
     
    Counsel for the prosecution ignored those attractive byways. He asked me whether, a fortnight earlier, I had been in the district asking questions about the atomic establishment and the accommodation at the manor. I admitted that I had, and that it was natural enough. I hoped, I said, to be invited to eat a meal, and had not realized that an invitation would be so difficult to obtain.
     
    ‘You did not appreciate, perhaps,’ he asked me, ‘that the establishment would be so security-minded?’
     
    ‘No, I did not.’
     
    ‘It had not occurred to you that some of the administrators might be working at night on papers classified as Most Secret?’
     
    ‘No.’
     
    ‘Sir Alexander Romilly, for example?’
     
    ‘I am sure Sir Alexander would never take back to his rooms any documents which would be safer at