As the summer drags on and gets hotter, Miss Allen calls the team together again. Miss Marsden reports, with some embarrassment, that she seems to have fans; one of them, who seemed to think she was after a superior sort of palm-reading, asked her about the fan’s neighbour, in whom Marsden suspects she is romantically interested; Marsden had a dream-vision of a figure, perhaps the neighbour, dissolving into a spreading puddle of slime, and this concerns her somewhat (not least because of its clarity). The client is Lily Preston, of Bedford Gardens in Kensington; the neighbour is Harold Peters. The group agrees to a meeting with Preston in a tea-shop the next day.