A voice, close at her elbow, made her start guiltily.
‘No one in the ladies’ saloon? Well, then, Mrs. Gaston Arbuthnot must have tumbled overboard. Her husband and I have vainly searched the Princess for her.’ Oh, kindly Cassandra! Was no small bit of embroidery tacked on, just at this juncture, over the bare truth? ‘So much for trusting valuable entomological specimens out of one’s own hands!’
‘Miss Tighe, I am here. I have been trying to get a little warm. Your moth is safe,’ stammered Dinah.
She scarcely knew in what fashion the words left her dry and trembling lips.
‘Moth? A country-bred girl like you not to know that a speckled white, although, by luck, we caught him out of hours, is a butterfly! Well, I have brought back our other pair of butterflies, safe and sound.’ Before saying this Cassandra had put on her spectacles and carried her box beneath the doorway lamp. She made a great show of examining its contents, critically, thus allowing Dinah to recover her self-possession, unnoticed. ‘From certain murmurings I overheard among the sailors I believe we, all three, narrowly escaped being abandoned to our fate.’
‘Mrs. Thorne had begun to think that her husband was on board?’
Dinah’s constrained tone was one of doubt rather than inquiry.
‘My dear, nobody ever knows what Mrs. Thorne thinks. Linda is a charming woman, the pleasantest companion, when she chooses, in the world. But, as the Doctor says, Linda might reason. These electric transitions, from gay to grave, and back to gay again, are embarrassing in a world where the rest of us walk by rule. Linda Thorne is all impulse.’
‘Ah!’
‘At the first word of the Doctor’s disappearance, to run off, helter-skelter, like a schoolgirl ... yes, Linda Thorne,’ cried Cassandra, peering round at some person or persons across her shoulder, ‘I am talking of you. Come down and hear all the wicked things I have to say. At the first word of the Doctor’s disappearance to run off like a schoolgirl, taking somebody else’s husband with her! It was atrocious! Who is that behind you, Linda? Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot. Tell Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot, from me, that everything worth looking after on board the Princess is found.’