“When her note came—that note, you know—what would you have said in her place? No, I don’t mean that. You’d have said: ‘Well, I’m damned!’ But what would you have expected her to say?”
“‘Great God!’ or perhaps ‘Good gracious!’” Sir Paget suggested doubtfully.
“She’s gone—gone!” I ventured to submit.
“Just so—just what I should have said,” Aunt Bertha agreed. “Something like that. What our friend Mrs. Knyvett did say to me was, ‘Miss Fleming, she’s done it!’”
“What did you say?” Sir Paget as nearly snapped this out as a man of his urbanity could snap.
“I don’t think I said anything. There seemed nothing to——”
“Then you knew what she meant?”
Aunt Bertha pouted her lips and looked, as it might be, apprehensively, at Sir Paget.
“Yes, I suppose I must have,” she concluded—with an obvious air of genuine surprise.