Part of her gratitude arose from the fact that she regarded it as a privilege to thwart the designs of the evil-doer and to serve the ends of justice, which she would certainly have spelt with a capital letter. Her experience provided many occasions on which through her agency the innocent had been protected and restored. She found a benevolent pleasure in remembering these cases. Garth and Janice Albany had figured in one of them. On the day after her expedition to Blackheath Miss Silver was sitting by a neat, bright fire in her flat in Montague Mansions. She had almost finished the stocking for Johnny Burkett which she had been knitting in the train on the previous day. As soon as this pair was completed she would begin another, since she had promised her niece Ethel three pairs before Christmas. So extremely fortunate that she had laid in a good stock of this useful wool before the coupon system came in. Not that she had expected anything of the sort—oh, dear me, no—but she remembered only too well the alarming price of knitting-wool during and immediately after the last war, and had accordingly taken precautions.
