She raised her eyes a moment. ‘I always was,’ she murmured, with, she hoped, blood-curdling significance.
‘Older?’ repeated Mrs. Colquhoun, whose hearing, as she often told her friends, was still, she was thankful to say, unimpaired. ‘That, my young friend, is what may be said daily of us all. No doubt Mrs. Cumfrit notices a change even in you. Have you not met for a long while?’
‘Not for an eternity,’ said Christopher, in the sort of voice a man swears with.
A motor-cycle with a side-car was in the road outside the gate, and Mrs. Colquhoun paused on seeing it.
‘Yours, of course, Mr. Monckton,’ she said. ‘This is the machine in which you have dropped out of the skies on us. And with a side-car, too. An empty one, though. I don’t like to think of a young man with an empty side-car. But perhaps the young lady has merely gone for a little stroll?’
‘I have brought it to take Mrs. Cumfrit back to London in,’ said Christopher stiffly; but of what use stiffness, of what use dignity, when one was being made to look and be such a hopeless fool?
‘Really?’ said Mrs. Colquhoun, excessively surprised. ‘Only, she doesn’t go back till Monday—do you, dear Mrs. Cumfrit. Ah, no—don’t talk. I forgot.’
‘Neither do I,’ said Christopher.
‘Really?’ said Mrs. Colquhoun again; and was for a moment, in her turn, silent.
A side-car seemed to her a highly unsuitable vehicle for a person of Mrs. Cumfrit’s age. Nor could she recollect, during all the time she had, off and on, known her, ever having seen her in such a thing. Instinct here began to warn her, as she afterwards was fond of telling her friends, that the situation was not quite normal. How far it was from normal, however, instinct in her case, being that of a decent elderly woman presently to become a grandmother, was naturally incapable of guessing.