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' "Kindness," said Erica, to her father's head groom, "have you anything laid by?"

Kindness paused in his checking the corn account, shot her a pale glance from a wrinkled old eye, and went on with his adding. "Tuppence!" he said at length, in the tone one uses instead of a spit. This referred to the account, and Erica waited. Kindness hated accounts. "Enough to bury me decent," he said, having reached the top of the column again.

"You don't want to be buried yet a while. Could you lend me ten pounds, do you think?"

The old man paused in licking the stub of his pencil, so that the lead made a purple stain on the exposed tip of his tongue. "So that's the way it is!" he said. "What have you been doing now?"

"I haven't been doing anything. But there are some things I might want to do. And petrol is a dreadful price." The mention of petrol was a bad break.

"Oh, the car is it?" he said jealously. Kindness hated Tinny. "If it's the car you want it for, why don't you ask Hart?"

"Oh, I couldn't." Erica was almost shocked. "Hart is quite new." Hart being a newcomer with only eleven year's service. Kindness looked mollified. "It isn't anything shady," she assured him. "I would have got it from Father at dinner tonight; the money, I mean; but he has gone to Uncle William's for the night. And women are so inquisitive," she added after a pause. This, which could only refer to Nannie, made up the ground she had lost over the petrol. Kindness hated Nannie.

"Ten pounds is a big bit out of my coffin," he said with a sideways jerk of his head.

"You won't need it before Saturday.…"

"And what made you come to Kindness?"

There was complacence in the tone, and anyone but Erica would have said: Because you are my oldest friend, because you have always helped me out of difficulties since I was three years old and first put my legs astride a pony, because you can keep my counsel, and because in spite of your cantankerousness you are an old darling. But Erica said, "I just thought how much handier tea-caddies were than banks."

"What's that!"

"Oh, perhaps I shouldn't have said that. Your wife told me about that, one day when I was having tea with her. It wasn't her fault really. I saw the notes peering through the tea. A bit germy, I thought. For the tea, I mean. But an awfully good idea." As Kindness was still speechless. "Boiling water kills most things, anyhow. Besides," she said, bringing up for support what she should have used for attack, "who else could I go to?" '

Josephine Tey
A Shilling for Candles

The book is another of Tey's non-typical mysteries and Erica is one of my favorite characters in all of literature. She's so richly drawn that I almost feel that I know her from somewhere. Great stuff.