And in her clear, precise, dominating voice Hilda with gay ease greeted the company from above:
"Good evening, all!"
"What the deuce was I so upset about just now?" thought Edwin, in sudden, instinctive, exulting felicity: "Everything is absolutely all right."
CHAPTER III
ATTACK AND REPULSE
I
The entering guests were Edwin's younger sister Clara with her husband Albert Benbow, his elder sister Maggie, Auntie Hamps, and Mr. Peartree. They had arrived together, and rather unfashionably soon after the hour named in the invitation, because the Benbows had called at Auntie Hamps's on the way up, and the Benbows were always early, both in arriving and in departing, "on account of the children." They called themselves "early birds." Whenever they were out of the nest in the evening they called themselves early birds. They used the comparison hundreds, thousands, of times, and never tired of it; indeed each time they were convinced that they had invented it freshly for the occasion.
Said Auntie Hamps, magnificent in jetty black, handsome, and above all imposing:
"I knew you would be delighted to meet Mr. Peartree again, Edwin. He is staying the night at my house--I can be so much more hospitable now Maggie is with me--and I insisted he should come up with us. But it needed no insisting."
The old erect lady looked from Mr. Peartree with pride towards her nephew.