“For what?” asked Derrick. His eyes were keen.
“For letting the place at all. We took another, stayed in it a month, then gave that up, and have been living in hotels ever since. I hate living in my trunks.”
“You don’t happen to be in the market for Beech Lodge, do you?”
She sent him a swift look of intelligence. “Whatever made you think of that? Are we, James? If I do the letting, you generally do the renting.”
Light began to dawn on the Derricks, and Edith made a cautious little signal.
“My brother is only joking, of course. The idea is too funny. We’ve just had all the expense and trouble of moving in, and it’s foolish to dream of anything but staying here. Don’t mind what he says.”
Thursby pushed out his lips. “Oh, I don’t know that it’s so foolish. If circumstances, I mean business ones, are satisfactory, nothing is foolish. I learned long ago that when my wife gets a premonition that we’re going to do something, we most always do. For instance,” he blurted, “if she were to say she had a feeling we were going to move back to Beech Lodge I’d bet on it. It’s safe money.”
Derrick laughed. “Aren’t you reckoning a little without your host?”
“I know it sounds like that. I say, I wonder what Mrs. Millicent thought of all this.”
“She probably thinks it’s a sort of release for that woman and every one else,” put in his wife hastily; “and that’s the only way to look at it. A sort of a general clean-up, I call it. Fancy that gardener coming back, too. He must have been the only person in the world who wasn’t frightened of his wife.”