"Won't you come back into the drawing-room?" Mrs. Jervaise was saying to
the Sturtons.
"Oh! thank you, it's _hardly_ worth while, is it?" Mrs. Sturton answered
effusively, but she loosened the shawl that muffled her throat as if she
were preparing for a longer wait. "I'm _so_ sorry," she apologised for the
seventh time. "So very unfortunate after such a really delightful
evening."
They kept up that kind of conversation for quite a long time, while we
listened eagerly for the sound of the motor-horn.
And no motor-horn came; instead, after endlessly tedious minutes, John
returned bearing himself like a portent of disaster.
The confounded fellow whispered again.
"What, not anywhere?" Jervaise asked irritably. "Sure he hasn't gone to
bed?"
John said something in that too discreet voice of his, and then Jervaise
scowled and looked round at the ascending humanity of the staircase. His
son Frank detached himself from the swarm, politely picked his way down
into the Hall, and began to put John under a severe cross-examination.
"What's up now, do you suppose?" Miss Tattersall asked, with the least
tremor of excitement sounding in her voice.
"Perhaps the chauffeur has followed the example of Carter, and afterwards
hidden his shame," I suggested.
I was surprised by the warmth of her contradiction. "Oh, no" she said. "He
isn't the least that sort of man." She said it as if I had aspersed the
character of one of her friends.
"He seems to have gone, disappeared, any-way," I replied.
"It's getting frightfully mysterious," Miss Tattersall agreed, and added
inconsequently, "He's got a strong face, you know; keen--looks as if he'd
get his own way about things, though, of course, he isn't a gentleman."
I had a suspicion that she had been flirting with the romantic chauffeur.
She was the sort of young woman who would flirt with any one.
I wished they would open that Hall door again. The action of my play had
become dispersed and confused. Frank Jervaise had gone off through the
baize door with John, and the Sturtons and their host and hostess were
moving reluctantly towards the drawing-room.
"We might almost as well go and sit down somewhere," I suggested to Miss
Tattersall, and noted three or four accessible blanks on the staircase.
"Almost," she agreed after a glance at the closed door that shut out the
night.
In the re-arrangement I managed to leave her on a lower step, and climbed
to the throne of the gods, at present occupied only by Gordon Hughes, one
of Frank Jervaise's barrister friends from the Temple. Hughes was reputed
"brilliantly clever." He was a tallish fellow with ginger red hair and a
long nose--the foxy type.
"Rum start!" I cried, by way of testing his intellectual quality, but
before I could get on terms with him, the stage was taken by a dark,
curly-haired, handsome boy of twenty-four or so, generally addressed as
"Ronnie." I had thought him very like a well-intentioned retriever pup. I
could imagine him worrying an intellectual slipper to pieces with great
gusto.
"I say, it's all U.P. now," he said, in a dominating voice. "What's the
time?" He was obviously too well turned out to wear a watch with evening
dress.