“But I’ve told you; he was tremendously friendly in a national manner.”
“And that seemed to you real?” she asked.
Michael considered.
“I don’t know that it did,” he said. “It all seemed to me rather feverish, I think.”
“And he asked quantities of questions, I think you said.”
“Hundreds. He was just like what he was when he came to Ashbridge. He reviewed the Yeomanry, and shot pheasants, and spent the afternoon in a steam launch, apparently studying the deep-water channel of the river, where it goes underneath my father’s place; and then in the evening there was a concert.”
Aunt Barbara did not heed the concert.
“Do you mean the channel up from Harwich,” she asked, “of which the Admiralty have the secret chart?”
“I fancy they have,” said Michael. “And then after the concert there was the torchlight procession, with the bonfire on the top of the hill.”
“I wasn’t there. What else?”