A bell was ringing for evening service when he landed in a market town which reversed the natural order by dozing all summer and waking up for the hunting season. And now the famous grass country was lying in its beauty-sleep, under a gay counterpane of buttercups and daisies, and leafy coverts, with but one blot in the sky-line, in the shape of a permanent plume of sluggish smoke. But the works lay hidden, and the hall came first; and Thrush, having ascertained that this was it, abandoned the decrepit vessel he had boarded at the station, and entered the grounds on foot.
A tall girl, pacing the walks with a terribly anxious face, was encountered and accosted before he reached the house.
“I believe Mr. Upton lives here. Can you tell me if he’s at home? I want to see him about something.”
Lettice flushed and shrank.
“I know who you are! Have you found my brother?”
“No; not yet,” said Thrush, after a pause. “But you take my breath away, my dear young lady! How could you be so sure of me? Is it no longer to be kept a secret, and is that why your father bolted out of town without a word?”
“It’s still a secret,” whispered Lettice, as though the shrubs had ears, “only I’m in it. Nobody else is—nobody fresh—but I guessed, and my mother was beginning to suspect. My father never stays away a Sunday unless he’s out of England altogether; she couldn’t understand it, and was worrying so about him that I wired begging him to come back if only for the night. So it’s all my fault, Mr. Thrush; and I know everything but what you’ve come down to tell us!”
“That’s next to nothing,” he shrugged. “It’s neither good nor bad. But if you can find your father I’ll tell you both exactly what I have found out.”
In common with all his sex, he liked and trusted Lettice at sight, without bestowing on her a passing thought as a person capable of provoking any warmer feeling. She was the perfect sister—that he felt as instinctively as everybody else—and a woman to trust into the bargain. It would be cruel and quite unnecessary to hide anything from that fine and unselfish face. So he let her lead him to a little artificial cave, lined and pungent with pitch-pine, over against the rhododendrons, while she went to fetch her father quietly from the house.
The ironmaster amplified the excuses already made for him; he had rushed for the first train after getting his daughter’s telegram, leaving but a line for Thrush with his telephone number, in the hopes that he would use it whether he had anything to report or not.