"I can't see them. I can't possibly, dear," Janet murmured, as it were intimidated. "I'll run back home."
Hilda replied with benevolent firmness:
"No you won't. Come upstairs with me till they're gone. Edwin, you go and see what they're after."
Janet faltered and obeyed, and the two women crept swiftly upstairs. They might have been executing a strategic retirement from a bad smell. The instinctive movement, and the manner, were a judgment on the ideals of the Benbows so terrible and final that even the Benbows, could they have seen it, must have winced and doubted for a moment their own moral perfection. It came to this, that the stricken fled from their presence.
"'What they're after'!" Edwin muttered to himself, half resenting the phrase; because Clara was his sister; and though she bored and exasperated him, he could not class her with exactly similar boring and exasperating women.
And, throwing down his cap, he went with false casual welcoming into the drawing-room.
Young Bert Benbow, prodigiously solemn and uncomfortable in his birthday spectacles, was with his father and mother. Immense satisfaction, tempered by a slight nervousness, gleamed in the eyes of the parents. And the demeanour of all three showed instantly that the occasion was ceremonious. Albert and Clara could not have been more pleased and uplifted had the occasion been a mourning visit of commiseration or even a funeral.
The washed and brushed schoolboy, preoccupied, did not take his share in the greetings with sufficient spontaneity and promptitude.
Clara said, gently shocked:
"Bert, what do you say to your uncle?"