"Where do you sail from?"
Julian answered—
"Southampton."
There was another pause. Louis and Rachel exchanged a glance of sympathetic dismay at the situation.
Mrs. Maldon then smiled with plaintive courage.
"Of course if you can't sleep here, you can't," said she benignly. "I can see that. But we were quite counting on having a man in the house to-night—with all these burglars about—weren't we, Rachel?" Her grimace became, by an effort, semi-humorous.
Rachel diplomatically echoed the tone of Mrs. Maldon, but more brightly, with a more frankly humorous smile—
"We were, indeed!"
But her smile was a masterpiece of duplicity, somewhat strange in a girl so downright; for beneath it burned hotly her anger against the brute Julian.
"Well, there it is!" Julian gruffly and callously summed up the situation, staring at the inside of his teacup.