Aunt Barbara made the best of it: shook hands in her jolly manner, and burst into laughter.
“Michael, I could slay you,” she said; “but before I do that I must tell your friends all about it. This horrible nephew of mine, Miss Falbe, promised me two weird musicians, and I expected—I really can’t tell you what I expected—but there were to be spectacles and velveteen coats and the general air of an afternoon concert at Clapham Junction. But it is nice to be made such a fool of. I feel precisely like an elderly and sour governess who has been ordered to come down to dinner so that there shan’t be thirteen. Give me your arm, Mr. Falbe, and take me in to dinner at once, where I may drown my embarrassment in soup. Or does Michael go in first? Go on, wretch!”
Presently they were seated at dinner, and Aunt Barbara could not help enlarging a little on her own discomfiture.
“It is all your fault, Michael,” she said. “You have been in London all these weeks without letting me know anything about you or your friends, or what you were doing; so naturally I supposed you were leading some obscure kind of existence. Instead of which I find this sort of thing. My dear, what good soup! I shall see if I can’t induce your cook to leave you. But bachelors always have the best of everything. Now tell me about your visit to Germany. Which was the point where we parted—Baireuth, wasn’t it? I would not go to Baireuth with anybody!”
“I went with Mr. Falbe,” said Michael.
“Ah, Mr. Falbe has not asked me yet. I may have to revise what I say,” said Aunt Barbara daringly.
“I didn’t ask Michael,” said Hermann. “I got into his carriage as the train was moving; and my luggage was left behind.”
“I was left behind,” said Sylvia, “which was worse. But I sent Hermann’s luggage.”
“So expeditiously that it arrived the day before we left for Munich,” remarked Hermann.
“And that’s all the gratitude I get. But in the interval you lived upon Lord Comber.”