“I sleuthed all over the house, till I sleuthed outside Miss Lamb’s door——” he stopped abruptly.
“And then?”
“Then I stopped sleuthing. It’s an ignoble pastime. Get me my screw-driver; something’s wrong with Cora.” A minute later he was completely happy, surrounded by Cora in eleven fragments; while Jenny, very excitable and talkative, enacted to him exactly how she had been “taken ill” during La llorraine’s song.
“—There. Now she’ll do.”
“There was nothing wrong with Cora; you wanted an excuse to pull her to bits,” Deb accused him.
“A man is only a child; he must play.”
“Fiddling at things?”
“Tinkering with things. Pottering over things. That’s a mercy!” as Dalila, on the other side of the wall, died to silence. “Our invalid had better be hoisted on to the bed; they’ll be coming in to enquire.”
Just in time Jenny hurled herself among the pillows, and drew the quilt up to her flushed cheeks. A knock at the door. The soldier eliminated himself against the wall. Deb went softly to the threshold: “Is that you, Manon?... Yes, she’s in here.... No, I wouldn’t come in; she ...” Deb backed the unseen visitor onto the landing. The other two, listening breathlessly, heard her low, capable, reassuring explanations: “... be all right presently ... room too hot ... strain of the last few weeks ... might do her good ... tell them not to worry....”
Jenny inserted a moan of corroboration.