"Then the horse would be where I was afraid of being," said the Nun, and suddenly gurgled.
"Silver armour! My! Don't you want to take me up to see her?" This came, in a perfectly audible aside, from Miss Miles to the Bird. Old Mr. Dove coughed, yet benevolently.
"Much armour?" asked Gilly, suddenly emerging from a deep attention to his plate. His hopes obviously running towards what may be styled a classical entertainment, the question was received with merriment.
"Completely encased, Gilly. I shall look like a lobster. Still, Mr. Rock will come and see me, if the rest of you don't."
"There are possibilities about Joan of Arc," Gilly pursued. "Not at all bad to lead off with Joan of Arc. Andy, you might make a note of Joan."
"If a frontispiece is of any use to you, Gilly—?" the Nun suggested politely.
"What can have become of Harry?" Again it was Andy Hayes who asked.
The Nun turned to him and, under cover of Billy's imaginative description of the frontispiece, said softly, "Can't you be happy unless you know Harry Belfield's all right?"
"He's a very long time," said Andy. "And they're early at Nutley, you know. Perhaps he's decided to go straight home to bed."
She looked at him for a moment, but said nothing. The tide of merry empty talk—gone in the speaking, like the wine in the drinking, yet not less pleasant—flowed on; only now Miss Flower to some degree shared Andy's taciturnity. She was not apprehensive or gloomy; it seemed merely that some sense of the real, the ordinary, course of life had come back to her; the hour of careless gaiety was no longer, like Joan of Arc, "completely encased" in silver armour.