"And ten days ago," he said, "I met death and despair in the hall, and that was you. 'This is what comes of the Luck' thought I. O Harry, if I wasn't so shaky I'd fetch you such a whack in the ribs!"
And after the manner of the British youth, they quite understood each other.
The influenza party left London next day after lunch. Lord Oxted had brought a whole library of blue-books with him, out of which he hoped to establish an array of damaging facts against the Government, and his red pencil, as they sped out of London, had no sinecure. Mile after mile of the inconceivable meanness of house-backs fell behind them, and at last Lady Oxted consented to the partial opening of one of the carriage windows.
"There, that is a proper breath of air," she said. "Sniff it in, Geoffrey. But I will have no suburban microbes flying into my face. Oh, we are wrecks, we are wrecks, but we will stop at Oxted till we are refloated."
Lord Oxted frowned heavily, and scored the offending page.
"Is the man Colonial Secretary," he asked, "or is he the autocrat of all the Englands? And it never occurred to any of them, apparently, that there might be something in those grand pianos. I should have thought that somebody might have guessed that this immense importation of huge cases implied something. But I am wrong; nobody guessed it. They said they could not be expected to see through stone walls. Stone walls, indeed! They couldn't see through plate-glass windows."
"So the pianos turned out to be stone walls," said his wife.
"Yes; they were put up round Pretoria."
The heat in London had been intense; perhaps it was not less at Oxted; but there was a difference in its quality unnoticed by the thermometer, and after tea the two wrecks made themselves exceedingly comfortable on the lawn, and Lady Oxted, without warning, began the statement of her idea to the very ordinary person.
"Harry's marriage is fixed for the middle of November," she said. "Evie will have to go back to Santa Margarita first, and I hope she may persuade her mother to come over for it. It is now the middle of July; there are four months before he will be married. Much may happen in four months."