"Oh, Mrs. Mackworth, those children are coming to tea to-morrow. I shall be in, and I will—er—entertain them."
Mrs. Mackworth, who had had in contemplation a tea-party to two cronies in her own room, looked relieved at the intelligence.
"Then you won't require my presence, Mr. Graeme?"
"No, thank you," replied Graeme, with the desperate calm of a man who had deliberately burned his boats.
4
The following morning found the children in a glow of pleasurable anticipation which their landlady, on learning of the impending visit, cheerfully fanned to fever pitch. She had been a housemaid "up at the house" in her youth, and held the children spellbound with her description of its glories.
"There's armour there enough for a regiment of soldiers," she said with fine disregard of modern military equipment, "and pictures by the mile. Chimney-vases hundreds of years old, worth their weight in gold, standing about in corners like dirt. Mind, too," she added, with a ring of sombre reminiscence in her tones, "they break if you so much as look at 'em. Don't forget to see the tapestry that was wove by a queen and her ladies, and if Mr. Graeme's there, get him to show you the secret passage—there's one behind a sliding panel in Sir Malcolm's library."
"Oh!" gasped Jane and Cornelius James in chorus.
"Graeme will be there," cried the latter with dancing eyes.
"And a nice young gentleman he is," said the woman. "Comes here to get my husband to go ferreting and drops in afterwards for a cup of tea. Quiet, you know, and unassuming; happier, they say, with us farmer folk than with lords and ladies of the County. That's the gossip in these parts, but I was never one myself for——"