three in the
afternoon
He had gone up in the big car and his wife was alone , and so , with Susan upstairs still deftly measuring for totally unnecessary hangings , Lady Harman was able to add a fur stole and a muff and some gloves to her tweed gardening costume , walk unchallenged into the garden and from the garden into the wood and up the hillside and over the crest and down to the high-road and past that great advertisement of Staminal Bread and so for four palpitating miles , to the railway station and the outer world . She had the good fortune to find a train imminent , -- the twelve-seventeen . She took a first-class ticket for London and got into a compartment with another woman because she felt it would be safer . § 10 Lady Harman reached Miss Alimony 's flat at half-past three in the afternoon . She had lunched rather belatedly and uncomfortably in the Waterloo Refreshment Room and she had found out that Miss Alimony was at home through the telephone . `` I want to see you urgently , '' she said , and Miss Alimony received her in that spirit . She was hatless but she had a great cloud of dark fuzzy hair above the grey profundity of her eyes and she wore an artistic tea-gown that in spite of a certain looseness at neck and sleeve emphasized the fine lines of her admirable figure .