"Now?"
"He's outside waiting. He wouldn't come in. I'll go and send him to you. No, don't object: there are ever so many things that you two elders had better talk over together. I must say," said Cuthbert, beginning to laugh again in his light-hearted way, "that, when I think of Wyvis as a family man, bent on seeing his younger brother se ranger, and you as Nora's stern guardian, I am seized with an access of uncontrollable mirth."
He caught up his hat and left the room so quickly that Janetta, taken by surprise, could not stop him. She tried to follow, but she was too late: he had rushed off, leaving the hall-door open, and a draught of cold air was ascending the stairs and causing her stepmother peevishly to remark that Janetta's visitors were really intolerable. "Who was it, this time?" she asked of her second daughter Georgie, who was standing at the window—the mother and her girls being assembled in Mrs. Colwyn's bedroom, her favorite resort on cold afternoons.
Georgie gave a little giggle—her manners were not perfect, in spite of a term at Mrs. Smith's superior seminary for young ladies—and answered, under her breath—
"It was Mr. Cuthbert Brand."
Nora's book fell from her knee. When she picked it up her cheeks were crimson and her eyes were flashing fire.
"Don't be absurd, Georgie. It was not."
"Indeed it was, Nora. I suppose he came to see Janetta, and Janetta has sent him away. Oh, how he's running, although he is a little lame! He has caught some one—his brother, I believe it is; and now the brother's walking back with him."
"I shall go down," said Mrs. Colwyn, with dignity. "It is not at all proper for a young person like Janetta to receive gentlemen alone. I shall go and sit in the drawing-room myself."
"Then Janetta will take her visitors into the dining-room," said Nora, abruptly. "She has only business with these people, mamma: they don't come to visit us because they like us—it is only when they want us to do something for them; so I would not put myself out for them if I were you. And as for Janetta's being young, she is the oldest person amongst us." And then Nora turned to her book, which she held upside down without being at all aware of it.