Every one was listening now, and Mr. Steele seemed very anxious, to judge by his face.
“If you were a Lincolnshire Trevelyan I’d break your neck directly after dinner,” observed the nice-looking man, and he suddenly grew calm again, and seemed to take no further interest in Bob.
The latter began to understand; and when the Empress of China suddenly dissolved in tears and repeated that hers was a very, very sad story, he had no doubts left as to where he and his friends were.
At this point the Rev. Mr. Weede pointed a thin finger at Lady Dorothy, and addressed the company in pulpit tones. “Providence,” he said, “in its inscrutable wisdom, has been pleased to afflict our dear sister with the delusion that she entered these consecrated precincts in a balloon. The prayers of the congregation are requested for—”
“Mr. Weede,” cried Mr. Steele in ringing tones, “I must insist that you do not indulge in jests unworthy of a gentleman and not befitting your cloth!”
The young golfing clergyman smiled blandly, quite unabashed, and answered in a single syllable, sharp and clear—“Fore!”
At this wholly unexpected and irrelevant retort, Anne Trevelyan broke into a laugh.
“One to the parson!” observed Jocelyn in an undertone.
Things might have ended then, but at this moment an old gentleman with a very beautiful white beard and smooth snowy hair began to sing to himself a music-hall song of forty years ago in a thin and quavering tenor voice:
“Up in a balloon, boys, up in a balloon,
All among the little stars, sailing round the moon!”