"I don't think so, and I don't care."
"Darling," Jenny asked quietly, "have you any idea how lordly you can look and sound, when you get annoyed with somebody?"
"Me?"
This, to him, seemed so nonsensical that he put it down to some fancy of Jenny's romantic brain. He glanced round the dim, heavily stuffy hall, where the lean and sallow-haired
Dawson in his shabby butler clothes seemed a kind of symbol.
"No," Jenny answered his thought mockingly, with a smile on her entirely irresistible mouth, "we didn't make the house look like a place of mourning because of the noise. It's a sort of gesture: when Grandmother comes back. Upstairs at the window we've been having a kind of signally-game with Mr. MacDougall. I don't know what it means, but he says it's frightfully important. Come along!"
Again the front-door knocker rapped, but far too heavily for it to have been Ruth Callice. Martin had his own guess.
"Chief Inspector Masters?" he shouted; and, at an affirmative reply, he nodded to Dawson.
Masters, having already pushed out a dent in his bowler hat and dusted off his blue serge suit, crossed the threshold with brief-case and cardboard folder under one arm; and he had the air of a tethered bull.
"Sorry to jntrude, miss," he said, being not quite sure of Jenny's title and knowing she didn't like it anyway, "but this is business."