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84 of coal that very day to the hospital, so strongly had Elizabeth’s perfidious warning inflamed her imagination as to the fate of hoarders, and all the time Elizabeth’s own cellars were glutted, though she had asserted that she was almost fuelless. Why, she must have in her possession more coal than Diva herself, since Mr. Wootten had clearly implied that it was Elizabeth who could be borrowed from! And all because of a wretched piece of rose-madder worsted….

By degrees she calmed down, for it was no use attempting to plan revenge with a brain at fever-heat. She must be calm and icily ingenious. As the cooling-process went on she began to wonder whether it was worsted alone that had prompted her friend’s diabolical suggestion. It seemed more likely that another motive (one strangely Elizabethan) was the cause of it. Elizabeth might be taken for certain as being a coal-hoarder herself, and it was ever so like her to divert suspicion by pretending her cellar was next to empty. She had been equally severe on any who might happen to be hoarding food, in case transport was disarranged and supplies fell short, and with a sudden flare of authentic intuition, Diva’s mind blazed with the conjecture that Elizabeth was hoarding food as well.

Luck ever attends the bold and constructive thinker: the apple, for instance, fell from the tree precisely when Newton’s mind was groping after the law of gravity, and as Diva stepped into her grocer’s to begin her morning’s shopping (for she had been occupied with roses ever since breakfast) the attendant was at the telephone at the back of the shop. He spoke in a lucid telephone-voice.

“We’ve only two of the big tins of corned beef,” he said; and there was a pause, during which, to a psychic, Diva's ears might have seemed to grow as pointed with