“Never, unless it did,” he laughed, hoping to find some way of diverting the talk from the unwelcome tunnel channel. But Miss Virginia, with an end in view, was not of those who may be easily turned aside.
“Then there was Mr. Silas Plegg,” she went on. “I have had a good many escorts, first and last—and some of them unwilling, no doubt—but Mr. Plegg capped the climax. He was as nervous as a cat after we got inside, and if I didn’t know him so well, I should say he acted as if he were afraid of something.”
“He was,” Plegg’s chief confirmed grimly. “I have given positive orders that no one, other than those connected with the working shifts, be admitted to the tunnel headings. Plegg knew he would be in for a bawling-out when I should find out what he’d done.”
The young woman’s smile was a mocking little grimace.
“It wasn’t at all that kind of ‘afraid’; it seemed to me more like just plain scare. While we were watching the drills, Mr. Regnier pulled him aside and spoke to him. They probably thought the drills were making such a clatter that I couldn’t hear what they said; but I did hear.”
“Cuss-words?” David suggested. He was still trying to maintain the good-naturedly playful attitude.
She nodded vigorously. “Perfectly hair-raising!” she assured him. “Mr. Regnier said, ‘Why in the’—a long string of sizzling things—‘do you bring her here? Have you not of the senses the—blinkety-blank-blank—smallest portion?’
“I couldn’t hear what excuse Mr. Plegg made, but it was evidently not a very good one, for Mr. Regnier broke loose again: ‘Sacre bleu! you are prip-pare to get yourself deeslike. Hein! you shall chase her out of here so queek as le bon Dieu will let you!’ You spoke of discipline a minute ago. I shouldn’t think you’d allow one of the under-assistants to talk that way to your second in command. It’s disgraceful.”
Answering the disciplinary gibe, David sought once more to stave off the tunnel climax—if so be the breaker of discipline were working toward a climax. But again Miss Virginia proved herself a true inheritor of the Grillage obstinacies and persistences.
“There is something the matter with that tunnel, David, and I want to know what it is,” she urged gravely.