The Beresfords [are] like so many clocks wound up, and bound to go for a certain time whether they like it or not; and, apparently, they do like it. Now they have run down a little, Terence being exhausted after his last laughing attack, and Kit wrapped in contemplation of an old-fashioned hair brooch that is fastening an equally old-fashioned piece of priceless lace that adorns Miss Penelope's throat.
"Well, I can't think how they do it!" she says, lost in admiration of a little slim hair lady bending over a miniature hair urn in the most lachrymose attitude conceivable. "But they have put her eye in wrongly: she looks as if she is dying with laughter."
Here Miss Priscilla edges in her question, as to how they have contrived to be at Moyne at so early an hour.
"We came by the wrong train," says Terry. "We generally do. Ever since we left the South of France—where we were staying with the Bohuns, you know, on our way here—we have been missing our trains right and left, and turning up at all sorts of unexpected places. Haven't we, Kit?"
"You have," says Kit, with suspicious emphasis. "You have such a pretty trick of rushing into the first train you see, without ever asking any one where it is going. No wonder we always turned up at the wrong end."
"You've a pretty trick of putting everything down on other people's shoulders," says Terence, with open disgust. "Whose fault was it we were always so late at the stations that we hadn't time to make inquiries, I'd like to know? Could you," with fine irony, "tell us?"
"Certainly; it was nurse," replies Kit, with dignity.
"Dear me! and where is your nurse now?" asks Miss Priscilla, anxiously. The query is a fortunate one, in that it turns the conversation into a different channel, and checks the eloquence of Kit and Terry, who are plainly on the brink of an open war.
"When last I saw her," says Terence, "she was sitting on the top of our biggest box, with everything else strewn around her, and her feet resting on two brown-paper parcels.—I wonder," says Mr. Beresford, addressing Monica, "what on earth she had in those brown paper parcels. She has been hugging them night and day ever since she left Jerusalem."
"Dynamite," suggested Monica, lightly; whereupon the two Misses Blake turn pale.