She was still in black furs, with a black veil, but her cheeks were more flushed than usual, and her eyes danced.
“Think of Katya’s coming back!” she said, but her lower lip suddenly quivered. “Toto hasn’t started?” she asked. “His train doesn’t go till one.”
She regarded Dudley Leicester with something of impatience. She said afterwards that she had never before noticed he was goggle-eyed. He stood, enormously tall, his legs very wide apart, gazing at her with his mouth open.
“I’m not a ghost, man,” she said at last. “What’s wrong with you?”
Dudley Leicester raised his hand to his straw-coloured moustache.
“Grimshaw’s talking to Saunders,” he said.
Ellida looked at him incredulously. But eventually her face cleared. “Oh, about Peter?” she said. “I was beginning to think you’d got an inquest in the house....”
And suddenly she touched Dudley Leicester vigorously on the arm.
“Come! Get him up from wherever he is,” she said, with a good-humoured vivacity. “Katya’s more important than Peter, and I’ve got the largest number of things to tell him in the shortest possible time.”
Dudley Leicester, in his dull bewilderment, was veering round upon his straddled legs, gazing first helplessly at the bell beside the chimney-piece and then at the door. Even if he hadn’t been already bewildered, he would not have known very well how properly to summon a friend who was talking to a servant of his own. Did you ring, or did you go to the top of the stairs and call? But his bewilderment was cut short by the appearance of Grimshaw himself, and at the sight of his serene face just lighting up with a little smile of astonishment and pleasure, Dudley Leicester’s panic vanished as suddenly and irrationally as it had fallen on him. He even smiled, while Ellida Langham said, with a sharp, quick little sound, “Boo!” in answer to Robert’s exclamation of “Ellida!” But Grimshaw took himself up quickly, and said: