"Ah, go on! what a fool you're letting on to be!" replied the McRory child, with elegant sarcasm. She swung round on her heel and sped away again upon the trail, cannoning against old McRory in the back hall.
"I tell you, that's the lady!" soliloquised old McRory, from the deep of the back hall. I gathered that he was referring to the social capacity of his youngest daughter and thought he was probably right.
It was at this moment that deliverance broke like a sunburst upon us; I saw through the windows of the hall a dogcart and an outside car whirl past the door and onwards to the yard. The former was driven by Flurry Knox, the car by Michael the Aussolas pantry boy, apparently none the worse for his encounter with the vampire cook. I snatched an umbrella, and, regardless of the lounge suit, followed with all speed the golden path of the sunburst.
Flurry, clad in glistening yellow oilskins, met me in the yard, wearing an expression of ill-concealed exultation worthy of Job's comforters at their brightest.
"D'ye know who opened your wire?" he began, regarding me with an all observant eye from under his sou-wester, while the rain drops ran down his nose. "I can tell you there's the Old Gentleman to pay at Aussolas—or the old lady, and that's worse! That's a nice suit—you ought to buy that from Curly."
"Who opened my telegram?" I said. I was not at all amused.
"'When she got there, the cupboard was bare,'" returned Flurry. "'Not a servant in the house, not a bit in the larder!' If it wasn't that by the mercy of providence I found the picnic basket that you bright boys had left after you, she'd have torn the house down!"
"I suppose you mean that your grandmother has come back," I said stonily.
"She fought with her unfortunate devil of a doctor at Buxton," said Flurry, permitting himself a grin of remembrance, "he told her she was too old to eat late dinner, and she told him she wasn't going to be a slave to her stomach or to him either, and she'd eat her dinner when she pleased, and she landed in at Aussolas by the mid-day train without a word."
"What did she say when she opened my telegram?" I faltered.