"Your affectionate father,
"Ferdinand Walbridge."
"Characteristic, isn't it?" Paul asked.
She nodded. "Yes, very. Something has happened to upset him. Wouldn't it be awful, Paul," she added, unconscious of any oddity in her speech, "if Clara chucked him after all and we had to take him back!"
"Take him back, indeed!"
"Yes, mother would, you know, if he came to grief."
He rose. "Not while I'm alive, she won't," he said, with the amazing firmness of the powerless. "Well, I must be off. I will send up some flowers if I can find any that are not a guinea a bloom." He hesitated and turned at the door. "Will you ring up Jenny and say they are coming, or shall I? They might dine instead of to-morrow——"
"You don't want Jenny here the first night they are back, do you?"
"Well, yes; to-morrow would be better, of course, but I have just remembered that I have an engagement to-morrow. Mother likes Jenny—she's never in anybody's way—and it will cheer Guy up to hear some music after his journey."
He went out, leaving his sister smiling over the peculiar and highly characteristic logic of his last speech. How like Paul! She knew that Oliver Wick would be sure to come straight to "Happy House" with his charges, because there was luggage to be seen to and carried up, and a thousand little matters to be settled before he went off to Brondesbury, so it would be after all only natural for him to stay and have a bit of dinner before he went on to Brondesbury, and as for Jenny, she was staying, as she so often did, with Joan Catherwood.