WHEN Superintendent Hogg died in the late ‘40’s, there was nothing to prevent his daughter, Flora, from realizing an ambition which had been simmering in her mind for quite a number of years. Her Christian name she owed to the romantic tempera­ment of her mother, who had predeceased the Superin­tendent by ten years, a temperament which Flora had in no small measure inherited, though it had remained undiscovered by the majority of the pupils at the Surrey County School where she had been teaching French since before the war. In appearance she was moderately tall, had once had flaming red hair, a reminder of her Stirlingshire ancestry, now toning to a dull copper, and on her somewhat aggressive nose she balanced a pair of pince-nez.
    The Superintendent died early in January, with a consideration he had always shown to his subordinates, so that there was still one day after his cremation at Mortlake, a ceremony attended by an impressive gathering of the County Constabulary, including the Chief Constable himself, for Miss Hogg to compose and make a fair copy of the term’s notice she was required to give on desiring to relinquish her post. The headmis­tress had received her resignation with regret, tempered by the knowledge that at least fifty applicants were ready, furnished with nine copies each of three indubit­ably laudatory testimonials from the Principal of their Training College, their previous headmistress, and of the Vicar at home, to step into the vacant appointment.
    Miss Hogg got through the term with no outward sign to reveal the momentous decision she had arrived at. She said good-bye to her colleagues, her pupils and the headmistress, received with suitable expressions of gratification a quite expensively fitted dressing-case with which they marked their appreciation of her past efforts for the school, and departed to fulfil a minor ambition, for she had never before felt able to resign her father into the somewhat chapped hands of the daily woman, by going on a conducted tour of Italy. It was not a great success. Spring had delayed its journey to the Apennines, there was fog in Milan, a flurry of snow obscured the decaying glory of Rome, and although the cold kept in check the smells of Venice, the necessity for the constant use of an umbrella interfered with the larger perspectives. Worst of all, Miss Hogg was a con­firmed potterer who loved idling in market-places, in piazzas, before shops that sold every variety of bon­dieuseries. But the guide, a Mr. Dalrymple on vacation from Cambridge, had an almost religious determination to prevent Satan’s being provided with idle hands, or it may simply have been a Marxist aversion from indivi­dual aberrations from the norm. Whatever it was, Miss Hogg found herself treated as a member of a herd, dragooned from the Vatican to the Pincian Gardens, and from the Academia to the Pineta and San Apollin­are in Classe. To the end of her life she was never able to remember whether it was Vergil or Dante whose tomb she had gazed upon through an iron grille in a street of Ravenna, and Matthew Arnold’s poem which would have settled the matter for her was not among the lyrical and elegiac verses selected by Palgrave for his pioneer anthology, which had been a set book in Miss Hogg’s training year.
    She arrived back in South Green on the last Friday in April, spent the week-end making the front room of her little house in Acacia Avenue look as much like an office as possible, a task which the late Superintendent’s wallpaper negatived from the start, and on the Monday, just before eight o’clock in the morning she screwed, a trifle defiantly, a small brass plate into the middle of the front door. It had been engraved for her before she went away and read simply:

      MISS HOGG, B.A.
      Private Investigator

    The words, although admirably concise, had only been arrived at after a process of long and careful cogitation. ‘Detective’ or ‘Private Detective’ she had rejected as being a little too assertive considering her amateur status even if she had been born not in the purple but at least in the blue; ‘Private Eye’, a term she was familiar with from her extensive acquaintance with American thrillers, was too flamboyant, and probably unintelligible to the majority of those whom she hoped to rope in as her clientele; and ‘Confidential Enquiries’ seemed too redolent of the Divorce Court which she hoped, except in the extreme of financial embarrass­ment, to avoid. She had already posted a letter to the Telephone Manager asking for a black entry in the next issue of the Telephone Directory, which she trusted would appear some time within the next two years, and she had sent copies of an advertisement to several news­papers, the wording of which she had scribbled down in the Café Florian at Venice while she listened with half an ear to Mr. Dalrymple’s story of the fall of the Cam­panile just out of sight at the end of the piazza.