“I am a goose! Let’s run round and see where I can put you. It was a shame to let you wait; we were picnicking. Did you ring?... Oh, I see! It doesn’t matter in the least; we’re breaking things all day long here. Mr. Mowbray, do be an angel, and help Ada carry up these trunks; you are so strong.”
Mr. Mowbray, a stolid bronzed young man, evidently in the army, signified his willingness to act as porter. And then Sebastian, who had noted with relief the absence of Mr. and Mrs. Johnson from the party, broke off his conversation with Letty, and, drawing Aureole aside, asked her if she could find him a room anywhere. “Because I’d like to move in at once.”
She scrutinized him intently ... then her gaze flickered to Letty.
“Yes. I see. You are feeling the pull—the strain. She is the moon, and you the tide ... it draws and draws ... I understand, Mr. Levi.” She motioned him to follow her up the wooden stairway which rose from the centre of the hall. Miss Fortescue and Bertie had preceded them, and: “This is the rummest boarding-house I’ve ever known,” the latter was heard whispering to his dazed sister, as Aureole and Sebastian approached them.
Not aware of aught unconventional in her reception of the Paying Guest, Aureole stopped on the first landing; and, frowning with a sort of reproach at the various unresponsive doors, said she believed that all those rooms were full.—“You see, I thought you would be Mr. and Mrs. Gilchrist; and then I expected you the day before yesterday.”
“And where would you have put me if I had been Mrs. Gilchrist the day before yesterday?” queried the prim girl from the Midlands, trying to cope with the situation.
“Here,” their hostess ran lightly down a flight of steps branching into a wing of the rambling old building; and displayed an enormous double bedroom. “Perhaps—perhaps you two young men wouldn’t mind sharing?” hopefully. “I should have to put you in an extra washstand, naturally. You can have Mr. Mowbray’s.”
Sebastian, rather enjoying matters, wondered of what other necessities the long-suffering Mowbray was to be deprived. All the same, if he was to write, he would want a room to himself; and this he made clear to Aureole, who looked worried,—and enquired irrelevantly of Miss Fortescue:
—“Would you like a cup of tea in the mornings?” She assumed an expression of portentous gravity, as though she had recollected something: “It’s extra, of course.”