walked beside me, to go on except the tip of a slightly inquiring nose and the tip of a slightly defiant chin and the downward curve of the row of ridiculously long eyelashes that were on the side next to me.
When we got back to the camp we found it in precisely the same condition in which we had left it—that is, in confusion. Every one seemed to be working very hard, and nothing seemed to be different from what it was a full hour before. Indeed, hours seem to have strangely little effect in caravaning: even hours and hours have little; and it is only when you get to hours and hours and hours that you see a change. In our preparations each morning for departure it always appeared to me that they would never have ended but for a sudden desperate unanimous determination to break them off and go.
The two young girls who had not appeared the previous night when I retired to rest had at last, as Menzies-Legh would say, turned up. They had done this, I gathered, early in the morning, having slept with their governess at an inn in Wrotham, she being a discreet person who preferred not to search in rain and darkness for that which when found might not be nice. She had arrived after breakfast, handed over her charges, and taken her departure; and the young girls as I at once saw were not young girls at all, but that nondescript creature with a thick plait down its back and a disconcerting way of staring at one that we in Germany describe as Backfisch and the English, I am told, allude to as flapper.
Lord Sigismund was cleaning boots, seated on the edge of a table in his shirt sleeves with these two nondescripts standing in a row watching him, and I was greatly touched by observing that the boot he was actually engaged upon at the moment of our approach was one of Edelgard’s.
This was magnanimity. More than ever was I sorry about the porridge. I hastily put down the stew-pot and the basket and hurried across to him.
“Pray allow me,” I said, snatching up another boot that stood on the table at his side and plunging a spare brush into the blacking.
“That one’s done,” said he, pipe in mouth.
“Ah, yes—I beg your pardon. Are these——?”
I took up another pair, with some diffidence, for the done ones and the undone ones had a singular resemblance to each other.