“I think Bill had better go,” Martyn firmly declared.
“I can’t. It’s awfully good of you, Mrs. Kendal, but my partner will do all that far better than I could.”
He smiled at Mrs. Fazackerly, who was smiling back at him happily, when the unexpected sound of old Carey’s voice suddenly and completely extinguished the brightness in her face.
“Nancy can go with you, Mrs. Kendal, as you’re kind enough to propose it, and there are one or two things I want done in the town. Nancy can see to them.”
Sallie’s clear, intelligent gaze went from one to the other of them. She sees a great deal, but she has not yet learned how to look as though she didn’t see it.
“If Martyn and I may go with you, Mrs. Kendal, we’ll sit in the back of the car and rehearse to one another. (Yes, Martyn, we must—time is frightfully short, and you know how woolly you are about your words.) And then Chris can take Nancy, and we can all meet somewhere for tea. What time, Mrs. Kendal?”
Sallie is always so confident, and decisive, and resolute, that she can carry things off with a high hand. Old Carey subsided again and Mrs. Kendal said, some seven or eight times, that as they always had tiffin early at Dheera Dhoon—“a reminiscence of our Indian days, I’m afraid—” she thought that they had better start at two o’clock.
“Besides,” said Captain Patch to me, aside, “I believe it takes the General nearly an hour to do the ten miles.”
At the last minute, the whole thing was nearly wrecked by General Kendal, who suddenly observed: “Then I am to have the pleasure of driving you, Mrs. Fazackerly? I hope that you will not feel nervous. I am something of a tyro still, but I believe I am a careful driver.”
“Thank you—not a bit—but—”