“Eleven,” said I.
“Oh, come quick, then,” said she. “We’ve missed half an hour already.”
Lord Marrible turned to Mrs. Withers.
“Well, you and I must console ourselves with supper,” he said, “as Robbie hasn’t asked us.”
It was all very well for Agnes to say that we would go quickly, but Mrs. Withers just clung.
“But wouldn’t he let me come too?” she said. “Mayn’t I drop you at his door, Miss Lockett, and I would wait while you asked him if I might come in?”
Agnes’s face dimpled again.
“My dear, if it were possible!” she said. “But with Robbie, however intimately you know him, you can’t quite do that. You agree with me, Lord Marrible, I know. But if—if he gives me a copy of the Cologne sonnets, or lets me make one, you may guess to whom I will show it, unless he absolutely forbids me to show it to anybody. How tiresome it is that you don’t know him!”
Mrs. Withers’s pearl trembled again.
“Or if lunch on Sunday won’t suit Mr. Oriole,” she said, “I have got a few people to dinner on Tuesday and Wednesday, and if you would bring him then I should be more than charmed.”