"If you please, sir, Mr. Edwin Clayhanger's called."
"Oh... well, I'm nearly finished. Where is he?"
"In the breakfast-room, sir."
"Well, tell him I'll be down in a minute."
"Hilda," said Mrs. Orgreave, "will you mind going and telling him?"
Hilda had replaced the book in its nest, and gone quickly back to her chair. The entrance of the servant at that moment, to announce Edwin Clayhanger, seemed to her startlingly dramatic. "What," she thought, "I am just reading that and he comes!... He hasn't been here for ages, and, on the very night that I come, he comes!"
"Certainly," she replied to Mrs. Orgreave. And she thought: "This is the second time she has sent me with a message to Edwin Clayhanger."
Suddenly, she blushed in confusion before the mistress of the home. "Is it possible," she asked herself,--"is it possible that Mrs. Orgreave doesn't guess what has happened to me? Is it possible she can't see that I'm different from what I used to be? If she knew... if they knew... here!"
She left the room like a criminal. When she was going down the stairs, she discovered that she held the Signal in her hand. She had no recollection of picking it up, and there was no object in taking it to the breakfast-room! She thought: "What a state I must be in!"