I
At the foot of the staircase he waited and listened, thinking he had
heard her call to him from the gallery, high aloft but out of view,
to which he had allowed her independent access and whence indeed, on
her first going up, the sound of her appreciation had reached him in
rapid movements, evident rushes and dashes, and in droll, charming
cries that echoed through the place. He had afterwards, expectant
and restless, been, for another look, to the house-door, and then had
fidgeted back into the hall, where her voice again caught him. It was
many a day since such a voice had sounded in those empty chambers, and
never perhaps, in all the years, for poor Chivers, had any voice at all
launched a note so friendly and so free.
“Oh, no, mum, there ain’t no one whatever come yet. It’s quite
all right, mum,--you can please yourself!” If he left her to range,
all his pensive little economy seemed to say, wasn’t it just his
poor pickings? He quitted the stairs, but stopped again, with his
hand to his ear, as he heard her once more appeal to him. “Lots of
lovely----? Lovely _what_, mum? Little ups and downs?” he quavered
aloft. “Oh, as you say, mum: as many as in a poor man’s life!”
She was clearly disposed, as she roamed in delight from point to point,
to continue to talk, and, with his better ear and his scooped hand,
he continued to listen hard. “‘Dear little crooked steps’? Yes,
mum; please mind ’em, mum: they be cruel in the dark corners!” She
appeared to take another of her light scampers, the sign of a fresh
discovery and a fresh response; at which he felt his heart warm with
the success of a trust of her that might after all have been rash. Once
more her voice reached him and once more he gossiped back. “Coming
up too? Not if you’ll kindly indulge me, mum--I must be where I can
watch the bell. It takes watching as well as hearing!”--he dropped,
as he resumed his round, to a murmur of great patience. This was taken
up the next moment by the husky plaint of the signal itself, which
seemed to confess equally to short wind and creaking joints. It moved,
however, distinguishably, and its motion made him start much more as
if he had been guilty of sleeping at his post than as if he had waited
half the day. “Mercy, if I _didn’t_ watch----!” He shuffled
across the wide stone-paved hall and, losing himself beneath the great
arch of the short passage to the entrance-front, hastened to admit his
new visitor. He gives us thereby the use of his momentary absence for a
look at the place he has left.
This is the central hall, high and square, brown and grey, flagged
beneath and timbered above, of an old English country-house; an
apartment in which a single survey is a perception of long and lucky
continuities. It would have been difficult to find elsewhere anything
at once so old and so actual, anything that had plainly come so far,
far down without, at any moment of the endless journey, losing its
way. To stand there and look round was to wonder a good deal--yet
without arriving at an answer--whether it had been most neglected or
most cherished; there was such resignation in its long survival and yet
such bravery in its high polish. If it had never been spoiled, this
was partly, no doubt, because it had been, for a century, given up;
but what it had been given up to was, after all, homely and familiar
use. It had in it at the present moment indeed much of the chill of
fallen fortunes; but there was no concession in its humility and no
hypocrisy in its welcome. It was magnificent and shabby, and the eyes
of the dozen dark old portraits seemed, in their eternal attention, to
count the cracks in the pavement, the rents in the seats of the chairs,
and the missing tones in the Flemish tapestry. Above the tapestry,
which, in its turn, was above the high oak wainscot, most of these
stiff images--on the side on which it principally reigned--were placed;
and they held up their heads to assure all comers that a tone or two
was all that _was_ missing, and that they had never waked up in winter
dawns to any glimmer of bereavement, in the long night, of any relic or
any feature. Such as it was, the company was all there; every inch of
old oak, every yard of old arras, every object of ornament or of use
to which these surfaces formed so rare a background. If the watchers
on the walls had ever found a gap in their own rank, the ancient roof,
of a certainty, would have been shaken by their collective gasp. As
a matter of fact it was rich and firm--it had almost the dignity of
the vault of a church. On this Saturday afternoon in August, a hot,
still day, such of the casements as freely worked in the discoloured
glass of the windows stood open in one quarter to a terrace that
overlooked a park and in another to a wonderful old empty court that
communicated with a wonderful old empty garden. The staircase, wide and
straight, mounted, full in sight, to a landing that was half-way up;
and on the right, as you faced this staircase, a door opened out of
the brown panelling into a glimpse of a little morning-room, where,
in a slanted, gilded light, there was brownness too, mixed with notes
of old yellow. On the left, toward court and garden, another door stood
open to the warm air. Still as you faced the staircase you had at your
right, between that monument and the morning-room, the arch through
which Chivers had disappeared.
His reappearance interrupts and yet in a manner, after all, quickens
our intense impression; Chivers on the spot, and in this severe but
spacious setting, was so perfect an image of immemorial domesticity. It
would have been impossible perhaps, however, either to tell his age
or to name his use: he was of the age of all the history that lurked
in all the corners and of any use whatever you might be so good as
still to find for him. Considerably shrunken and completely silvered,
he had perpetual agreement in the droop of his kind white head and
perpetual inquiry in the jerk of the idle old hands now almost covered
by the sleeves of the black dress-coat which, twenty years before,
must have been by a century or two the newest thing in the house and
into which his years appeared to have declined very much as a shrunken
family moves into a part of its habitation. This attire was completed
by a white necktie that, in honour of the day, he himself had this
morning done up. The humility he betrayed and the oddity he concealed
were alike brought out by his juxtaposition with the gentleman he had
admitted.
To admit Mr. Prodmore was anywhere and at any time, as you would
immediately have recognised, an immense admission. He was a personage
of great presence and weight, with a large smooth face in which
a small sharp meaning was planted like a single pin in the tight
red toilet-cushion of a guest-chamber. He wore a blue frock-coat
and a stiff white waistcoat and a high white hat that he kept on
his head with a kind of protesting cock, while in his buttonhole
nestled a bold prize plant on which he occasionally lowered a
proprietary eye that seemed to remind it of its being born to a public
career. Mr. Prodmore’s appearance had evidently been thought out,
but it might have struck you that the old portraits took it in with
a sterner stare, with a fixedness indeed in which a visitor more
sensitive would have read a consciousness of his remaining, in their
presence, so jauntily, so vulgarly covered. He had never a glance for
them, and it would have been easy after a minute to see that this was
an old story between them. Their manner, as it were, sensibly increased
the coolness. This coolness became a high rigour as Mr. Prodmore
encountered, from the very threshold, a disappointment.
“No one here?” he indignantly demanded.
“I’m sorry to say no one has come, sir,” Chivers replied; “but
I’ve had a telegram from Captain Yule.”
Mr. Prodmore’s apprehension flared out. “Not to say he ain’t
coming?”
“He was to take the 2.20 from Paddington; he certainly _should_
be here!” The old man spoke as if his non-arrival were the most
unaccountable thing in the world, especially for a poor person ever
respectful of the mystery of causes.
“He should have been here this hour or more. And so should my
fly-away daughter!”
Chivers surrounded this description of Miss Prodmore with the deep
discretion of silence, and then, after a moment, evidently reflected
that silence, in a world bestrewn with traps to irreverence, might be
as rash as speech. “Were they coming--a--together, sir?”
He had scarcely mended the matter, for his visitor gave an inconsequent
stare. “Together?--for what do you take Miss Prodmore?” This young
lady’s parent glared about him again as if to alight on something
else that was out of place; but the good intentions expressed in the
attitude of every object might presently have been presumed to soothe
his irritation. It had at any rate the effect of bridging, for poor
Chivers, some of his gaps. “It _is_ in a sense true that their
‘coming together,’ as you call it, is exactly what I’ve made
my plans for today: my calculation was that we should all punctually
converge on this spot. Attended by her trusty maid, Miss Prodmore, who
happens to be on a week’s visit to her grandmother at Bellborough,
was to take the 1.40 from that place. I was to drive over--ten
miles--from the most convenient of my seats. Captain Yule”--the
speaker wound up his statement as with the mention of the last touch in
a masterpiece of his own sketching--“was finally to shake off for a
few hours the peculiar occupations that engage him.”
The old man listened with his head askance to favour his good ear, but
his visible attention all on a sad spot in one of the half-dozen worn
rugs. “They _must_ be peculiar, sir, when a gentleman comes into a
property like this and goes three months without so much as a nat’ral
curiosity----! I don’t speak of anything but what _is_ nat’ral,
sir; but there have _been_ people here----”
“There have repeatedly been people here!” Mr. Prodmore complacently
interrupted.
“As you say, sir--to be shown over. With the master himself never
shown!” Chivers dismally commented.
“He _shall_ be, so that nobody can miss him!” Mr. Prodmore, for his
own reassurance as well, hastened to retort.
His companion risked a tiny explanation. “It will be a mercy indeed
to look on him; but I meant that he has not been taken round.”
“That’s what I meant too. _I’ll_ take him--round and round:
it’s exactly what I’ve come for!” Mr. Prodmore rang out; and his
eyes made the lower circuit again, looking as pleased as such a pair of
eyes could look with nobody as yet quite good enough either to terrify
or to tickle. “He can’t fail to be affected, though he _has_ been
up to his neck in such a different class of thing.”
Chivers clearly wondered awhile what class of thing it could be. Then
he expressed a timid hope. “In nothing, I dare say, but what’s
right, sir----?”
“In everything,” Mr. Prodmore distinctly informed him, “that’s
wrong! But here he is!” that gentleman added with elation as
the doorbell again sounded. Chivers, under the double agitation of
the appeal and the disclosure, proceeded to the front as fast as
circumstances allowed; while Mr. Prodmore, left alone, would have
been observed--had not his solitude been so bleak--to recover a
degree of cheerfulness. Cheerfulness in solitude at Covering End was
certainly not irresistible, but particular feelings and reasons had
pitched, for their campaign, the starched, if now somewhat ruffled,
tent of his large white waistcoat. If they had issued audibly from
that pavilion, they would have represented to us his consciousness
of the reinforcement he might bring up for attack should Captain
Yule really resist the house. The sound he next heard from the front
caused him none the less, for that matter, to articulate a certain
drop. “Only Cora?--Well,” he added in a tone somewhat at variance
with his “only,” “he shan’t, at any rate, resist _her_!”
This announcement would have quickened a spectator’s interest in
the young lady whom Chivers now introduced and followed, a young
lady who straightway found herself the subject of traditionary
discipline. “I’ve waited. What do you mean?”
Cora Prodmore, who had a great deal of colour in her cheeks and a great
deal more--a bold variety of kinds--in the extremely high pitch of
her new, smart clothes, meant, on the whole, it was easy to see, very
little, and met this challenge with still less show of support either
from the sources I have mentioned or from any others. A dull, fresh,
honest, overdressed damsel of two-and-twenty, she was too much out
of breath, too much flurried and frightened, to do more than stammer:
“Waited, papa? Oh, I’m sorry!”
Her regret appeared to strike her father still more as an impertinence
than as a vanity. “Would you then, if I had not had patience for you,
have wished not to find me? Why the dickens are you so late?”
Agitated, embarrassed, the girl was at a loss. “I’ll tell you,
papa!” But she followed up her pledge with an air of vacuity and
then, dropping into the nearest seat, simply closed her eyes to her
danger. If she desired relief, she had caught at the one way to get
it. “I feel rather faint. Could I have some tea?”
Mr. Prodmore considered both the idea and his daughter’s substantial
form. “Well, as I shall expect you to put forth _all_ your
powers--yes!” He turned to Chivers. “Some tea.”
The old man’s eyes had attached themselves to Miss Prodmore’s
symptoms with more solicitude than those of her parent. “I did
think it might be required!” Then as he gained the door of the
morning-room: “I’ll lay it out here.”
The young lady, on his withdrawal, recovered herself sufficiently to
rise again. “It was my train, papa--so very awfully behind. I walked
up, you know, also, from the station--there’s such a lovely footpath
across the park.”
“You’ve been roaming the country then alone?” Mr. Prodmore
inquired.
The girl protested with instant eagerness against any such
picture. “Oh, dear no, not _alone_!” She spoke, absurdly, as if she
had had a train of attendants; but it was an instant before she could
complete the assurance. “There were ever so many people about.”
“Nothing is more possible than that there should be _too_
many!” said her father, speaking as for his personal convenience,
but presenting that as enough. “But where, among them all,” he
demanded, “is your trusty maid?”
Cora’s reply made up in promptitude what it lacked in felicity. “I
didn’t bring her.” She looked at the old portraits as if to appeal
to them to help her to remember why. Apparently indeed they gave a
sign, for she presently went on: “She was so extremely unwell.”
Mr. Prodmore met this with reprobation. “Wasn’t she to understand
from the first that we don’t permit----”
“Anything of that sort?”--the girl recalled it at least as a
familiar law. “Oh, yes, papa--I _thought_ she did.”
“But she doesn’t?”--Mr. Prodmore pressed the point. Poor Cora, at
a loss again, appeared to wonder if the point had better be a failure
of brain or of propriety, but her companion continued to press. “What
on earth’s the matter with her?”
She again communed with their silent witnesses. “I really don’t
quite know, but I think that at Granny’s she eats too much.”
“I’ll soon put an end to _that_!” Mr. Prodmore returned with
decision. “You expect then to pursue your adventures quite into the
night--to return to Bellborough as you came?”
The girl had by this time begun a little to find her feet. “Exactly
as I came, papa dear,--under the protection of a new friend I’ve just
made, a lady whom I met in the train and who is also going back by the
6.19. She was, like myself, on her way to this place, and I expected to
find her here.”
Mr. Prodmore chilled on the spot any such expectations. “What does
she want at this place?”
Cora was clearly stronger for her new friend than for herself. “She
wants to see it.”
Mr. Prodmore reflected on this complication. “Today?” It was
practically presumptuous. “Today won’t do.”
“So I suggested,” the girl declared. “But do you know what she
said?”
“How should I know,” he coldly demanded, “what a nobody says?”
But on this, as if with the returning taste of a new strength, his
daughter could categorically meet him. “She’s not a nobody. She’s
an American.”
Mr. Prodmore, for a moment, was struck: he embraced the place,
instinctively, in a flash of calculation. “An American?”
“Yes, and she’s wild----”
He knew all about that. “Americans mostly _are_!”
“I mean,” said Cora, “to see this place. ‘Wild’ was what she
herself called it--and I think she also said she was ‘mad.’”
“She gave”--Mr. Prodmore reviewed the affair--“a fine account of
herself! But she won’t do.”
The effect of her new acquaintance on his companion had been such that
she could, after an instant, react against this sentence. “Well,
when I told her that this particular day perhaps wouldn’t, she said
it would just _have_ to.”
“Have to do?” Mr. Prodmore showed again, through a chink, his
speculative eye. “For _what_, then, with such grand airs?”
“Why, I suppose, for what Americans want.”
He measured the quantity. “They want everything.”
“Then I wonder,” said Cora, “that she hasn’t arrived.”
“When she does arrive,” he answered, “I’ll tackle her; and I
shall thank you, in future, not to take up, in trains, with indelicate
women of whom you know nothing.”
“Oh, I did know something,” his daughter pleaded; “for I saw her
yesterday at Bellborough.”
Mr. Prodmore contested even this freedom. “And what was she doing at
Bellborough?”
“Staying at the Blue Dragon, to see the old abbey. She says she just
loves old abbeys. It seems to be the same feeling,” the girl went on,
“that brought her over, today, to see this old house.”
“She ‘just loves’ old houses? Then why the deuce didn’t she
accompany you properly, since she is so pushing, to the door?”
“Because she went off in a fly,” Cora explained, “to see, first,
the old hospital. She just loves old hospitals. She asked me if this
isn’t a show-house. I told her”--the girl was anxious to disclaim
responsibility--“that I hadn’t the least idea.”
“It _is_!” Mr. Prodmore cried almost with ferocity. “I wonder,
on such a speech, what she thought of _you_!”
Miss Prodmore meditated with distinct humbleness. “I know. She told
me.”
He had looked her up and down. “That you’re really a hopeless
frump?”
Cora, oddly enough, seemed almost to court this description. “That
I’m not, as she rather funnily called it, a show-girl.”
“Think of your having to be reminded--by the very strangers you
pick up,” Mr. Prodmore groaned, “of what my daughter should
pre-eminently be! Your friend, all the same,” he bethought himself,
“is evidently loud.”
“Well, when she comes,” the girl again so far agreed as to reply,
“you’ll certainly hear her. But don’t judge her, papa, till you
do. She’s tremendously clever,” she risked--“there seems to be
nothing she doesn’t know.”
“And there seems to be nothing you do! You’re _not_ tremendously
clever,” Mr. Prodmore pursued; “so you’ll permit me to demand of
you a slight effort of intelligence.” Then, as for the benefit of the
listening walls themselves, he struck the high note. “I’m expecting
Captain Yule.”
Cora’s consciousness blinked. “The owner of this property?”
Her father’s tone showed his reserves. “That’s what it depends on
you to make him!”
“On me?” the girl gasped.
“He came into it three months ago by the death of his great-uncle,
who had lived to ninety-three, but who, having quarrelled mortally with
his father, had always refused to receive either sire or son.”
Our young lady bent her eyes on this page of family history, then
raised them but dimly lighted. “But now, at least, doesn’t he live
here?”
“So little,” her companion replied, “that he comes here today
for the very first time. I’ve some business to discuss with him that
can best be discussed on this spot; and it’s a vital part of that
business that you too should take pains to make him welcome.”
Miss Prodmore failed to ignite. “In his own house?”
“That it’s _not_ his own house is just the point I seek to
make! The way I look at it is that it’s _my_ house! The way I look
at it even, my dear”--in his demonstration of his ways of looking
Mr. Prodmore literally expanded--“is that it’s _our_ house. The
whole thing is mortgaged, as it stands, for every penny of its value;
and I’m in the pleasant position--do you follow me?” he trumpeted.
Cora jumped. “Of holding the mortgages?”
He caught her with a smile of approval and indeed of surprise. “You
keep up with me better than I hoped. I hold every scrap of paper, and
it’s a precious collection.”
She smothered, perceptibly, a vague female sigh, glancing over the
place more attentively than she had yet done. “Do you mean that you
can come down on him?”
“I don’t need to ‘come,’ my dear--I _am_ ‘down.’ _This_
is down!”--and the iron point of Mr. Prodmore’s stick fairly
struck, as he rapped it, a spark from the cold pavement. “I came many
weeks ago--commercially speaking--and haven’t since budged from the
place.”
The girl moved a little about the hall, then turned with a spasm of
courage. “Are you going to be very hard?”
If she read the eyes with which he met her she found in them, in spite
of a certain accompanying show of pleasantry, her answer. “Hard with
_you_?”
“No--that doesn’t matter. Hard with the Captain.”
Mr. Prodmore thought an instant. “‘Hard’ is a stupid, shuffling
term. What do you mean by it?”
“Well, I don’t understand business,” Cora said; “but I think I
understand _you_, papa, enough to gather that you’ve got, as usual,
a striking advantage.”
“As usual, I _have_ scored; but my advantage won’t be striking
perhaps till I have sent the blow home. What I appeal to you, as a
father, at present to do”--he continued broadly to demonstrate--“is
to nerve my arm. I look to you to see me through.”
“Through what, then?”
“Through this most important transaction. Through the speculation
of which you’ve been the barely dissimulated subject. I’ve brought
you here to receive an impression, and I’ve brought you, even more,
to make one.”
The girl turned honestly flat. “But on whom?”
“On me, to begin with--by not being a fool. And then, Miss, on
_him_.”
Erect, but as if paralysed, she had the air of facing the worst. “On
Captain Yule?”
“By bringing him to the point.”
“But, father,” she asked in evident anguish--“to _what_ point?”
“The point where a gentleman _has_ to.”
Miss Prodmore faltered. “Go down on his knees?”
Her father considered. “No--they don’t do that now.”
“What _do_ they do?”
Mr. Prodmore carried his eyes with a certain sustained majesty to a
remote point. “He will know himself.”
“Oh, no, indeed, he won’t,” the girl cried; “they don’t
_ever_!”
“Then the sooner they learn--whoever teaches ’em!--the better: the
better I mean in particular,” Mr. Prodmore added with an intention
discernibly vicious, “for the master of this house. I’ll guarantee
that he shall understand that,” he concluded, “for I shall do my
part.”
She looked at him as if his part were really to be hated. “But how on
earth, sir, can I ever do mine? To begin with, you know, I’ve never
even seen him.”
Mr. Prodmore took out his watch; then, having consulted it, put it back
with a gesture that seemed to dispose at the same time and in the same
manner of the objection. “You’ll see him _now_--from one moment to
the other. He’s remarkably handsome, remarkably young, remarkably
ambitious, and remarkably clever. He has one of the best and oldest
names in this part of the country--a name that, far and wide here,
one could do so much with that I’m simply indignant to see him do
so little. I propose, my dear, to do with it all he hasn’t, and I
further propose, to that end, first to get hold of it. It’s you, Miss
Prodmore, who shall take it out of the fire.”
“The fire?”--he had terrible figures.
“Out of the mud, if you prefer. You must pick it up, do you see? My
plan is, in short,” Mr. Prodmore pursued, “that when we’ve
brushed it off and rubbed it down a bit, blown away the dust and
touched up the rust, my daughter shall gracefully bear it.”
She could only oppose, now, a stiff, thick transparency that yielded a
view of the course in her own veins, after all, however, mingled with a
feebler fluid, of the passionate blood of the Prodmores. “And pray is
it also Captain Yule’s plan?”
Her father’s face warned her off the ground of irony, but he replied
without violence. “His plans have not yet quite matured. But nothing
is more natural,” he added with an ominous smile, “than that
they shall do so on the sunny south wall of Miss Prodmore’s best
manner.”
Miss Prodmore’s spirit was visibly rising, and a note that might
have meant warning for warning sounded in the laugh produced by
this sally. “You speak of them, papa, as if they were sour little
plums! You exaggerate, I think, the warmth of Miss Prodmore’s
nature. It has always been thought remarkably cold.”
“Then you’ll be so good, my dear, as to confound--it mightn’t be
amiss even a little to scandalise--that opinion. I’ve spent twenty
years in giving you what your poor mother used to call advantages,
and they’ve cost me hundreds and hundreds of pounds. It’s now time
that, both as a parent and as a man of business, I should get my money
back. I couldn’t help your temper,” Mr. Prodmore conceded, “nor
your taste, nor even your unfortunate resemblance to the estimable,
but far from ornamental, woman who brought you forth; but I paid out
a small fortune that you should have, damn you, don’t you know? a
good manner. You never show it to me, certainly; but do you mean to
tell me that, at this time of day--for other persons--you _haven’t_
got one?”
This pulled our young lady perceptibly up; there was a directness in
the argument that was like the ache of old pinches. “If you mean by
‘other persons’ persons who are particularly civil--well, Captain
Yule may not see his way to be one of them. He may not _think_--don’t
you see?--that I’ve a good manner.”
“Do your duty, Miss, and never mind what he thinks!” Her father’s
conception of her duty momentarily sharpened. “Don’t look at him
like a sick turkey, and he’ll be sure to think right.”
The colour that sprang into Cora’s face at this rude comparison
was such, unfortunately, as perhaps a little to justify it. Yet
she retained, in spite of her emotion, some remnant of presence of
mind. “I remember your saying once, some time ago, that that was just
what he would be sure _not_ to do: I mean when he began to go in for
his dreadful ideas----”
Mr. Prodmore took her boldly up. “About the ‘radical programme,’
the ‘social revolution,’ the spoliation of everyone, and the
destruction of everything? Why, you stupid thing, I’ve worked round
to a complete agreement with him. The taking from those who have by
those who haven’t----”
“Well?” said the girl, with some impatience, as he sought the right
way of expressing his notion.
“What is it but to receive, from consenting hands, the principal
treasure of the rich? If I’m rich, my daughter is my largest
property, and I freely make her over. I shall, in other words, forgive
my young friend his low opinions if he renounces them for _you_.”
Cora, at this, started as with a glimpse of delight. “He won’t
renounce them! He _shan’t_!”
Her father appeared still to enjoy the ingenious way he had put it,
so that he had good humour to spare. “If you suggest that you’re
in political sympathy with him, you mean then that you’ll take him as
he _is_?”
“I won’t take him at all!” she protested with her head very high;
but she had no sooner uttered the words than the sound of the approach
of wheels caused her dignity to drop. “A fly?--it must be _he_!”
She turned right and left, for a retreat or an escape, but her father
had already caught her by the wrist. “Surely,” she pitifully
panted, “you don’t want me to bounce on him _thus_?”
Mr. Prodmore, as he held her, estimated the effect. “Your frock
won’t do--with what it cost me?”
“It’s not my frock, papa,--it’s his thinking I’ve come here for
him to see me!”
He let her go and, as she moved away, had another look for the social
value of the view of her stout back. It appeared to determine him, for,
with a touch of mercy, he passed his word. “He doesn’t think it,
and he shan’t know it.”
The girl had made for the door of the morning-room, before reaching
which she flirted breathlessly round. “But he knows you want me to
hook him!”
Mr. Prodmore was already in the parliamentary attitude the occasion
had suggested to him for the reception of his visitor. “The way
to ‘hook’ him will be not to be hopelessly vulgar. He doesn’t
know that you know anything.” The house-bell clinked, and he waved
his companion away. “Await us there with tea, and mind you toe the
mark!”
Chivers, at this moment, summoned by the bell, reappeared in the
morning-room doorway, and Cora’s dismay brushed him as he sidled past
her and off into the passage to the front. Then, from the threshold of
her refuge, she launched a last appeal. “Don’t _kill_ me, father:
give me time!” With which she dashed into the room, closing the door
with a bang.