“Camilla is going out again!”
Mr. Champney rumbled inarticulately. Miss Eunice wondered if Camilla could have taken the paper upstairs. The young people of this generation were thoughtless, inconsiderate, and headstrong. But was it not injustice to Camilla to suspect her of carrying selfishly away her father's newspaper, a thing so important to his happiness before tea? Miss Eunice put aside her knitting and left the room, feeling uneasy.
She climbed the stairs and looked into Camilla's room, then climbed the second flight to the store-room. On the floor of the store-room, in front of the window, lay the paper, crushed and rumpled. Miss' Eunice gasped, took it up, and sat down on the tool chest. How could Camilla have been so rude, so inconsiderate! The staring headlines of the front page proclaimed: “Hicks Escaped; a Murder and a Suicide. The Incidents of a Night.”
“Rumours of Important Cabinet Officer's Retirement.”
“Uprising in Southwestern Europe Expected. Rumours from Roumania.”
“Hen-nion and Macclesfield Are Agreed. Improvements projected in Port Argent.”
“John Murphy knew the Deceased Coglan.”
“Father Harra Orders Plain Funerals for his Flock. Two Carriages and a Hearse are his Limit.”
None of these proclamations gave Miss Eunice any help in her amazement. No headline, except “Hennion and Macclesfield,” seemed to have any bearing on Camilla, and the column beneath that told nothing that Richard had not already told the family, about a railroad bridge and station, park improvements and so on; in which, it had been Miss Eunice's impression, Camilla had taken less interest than was becoming.
She sat on the tool chest, and stared at the front page of the crumpled newspaper, with a vague sense of distress. The air in the room seemed tense, the creases across the front of the paper like some wild and helpless handwriting, but what the interlinear writing meant, or whether it applied to “John Murphy” or “the deceased Coglan,” or “Hennion and Macclesfield,” or the “Cabinet officer,” was beyond her. This sign of Miss Eunice's trouble was sure, that she sat a long time on the old tool chest, and no more than Camilla remembered that Henry Champney was in the library, forlorn of his afternoon paper.