A CROOKED MILE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Exception
Good Boy Seldom
The Two Kisses

A CROOKED MILE

BY

OLIVER ONIONS

AUTHOR OF "THE TWO KISSES"

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1914

CONTENTS

A CROOKED MILE

I

THE WITAN

Lady Tasker had missed her way in the Tube. She had been on, or rather under known ground on the Piccadilly Railway as far as Leicester Square, but after that she had not heard, or else had forgotten, that in order to get to Hampstead by the train into which she had stepped she must change at Camden Town. Or perhaps she had merely wondered what Camden Town supposed itself to be that she should put herself to the trouble of changing there. With the newspaper held at arm's length, and a little figure-8-shaped gold glass moving slightly between her puckered old eyes and the page, she was reading the "By the Way" column of the "Globe."—"All change," called the man at Highgate; and, still unconscious of her mistake, Lady Tasker left the train. She was the last to enter the lift. But for an unhurried raising of the little locket-shaped glass as the attendant fidgeted at the half-closed gate she might have been the first to enter the next lift.

Only from the policeman outside Highgate Station did she learn that she must either take the Tube back again to Camden Town or else walk across the Heath.

Now Lady Tasker was seventy, and, with the exception of the Zoo, a place she visited from time to time with troops of turbulent great-nephews, the whole of North London was a sort of Camden Town to her, that is to say, she had no objection to its existence so long as it wasn't troublesome. It was half-past three when she said as much to the Highgate policeman, who up to that time had been an ordinary easy-going Conservative; by five-and-twenty minutes to four she had made of him a fuming Radical. He was saying something about South Square and Merton Lane. Lady Tasker addressed the bracing Highgate air in one of those expressionless and semi-ventriloquial asides that, especially in a mixed company, always made her ladyship very well worth sitting next to.

"Merton Lane! Does the man suppose that conveys anything to me?.... I want to know how to get to Hampstead, not the names of the objects of interest on the way!"

The newly-made Radical told her that there might be a taxi on the rank, and turned away to cuff the ears of an urchin who was tampering with an automatic