"Yes."
"Then I'm sure you agree with me," said Mrs. Eames, "that he's a perfect natural Hamlet—figure, manner, face, voice, everything. You ought to see him in the grave-digger scene—and you shall. This isn't the regular day for rehearsals, but we'll have one after lunch. I'll send Gladys round to tell everyone. It'll be so good for us all to hear what you have to say. I'm doing the Queen, Hamlet's mother, you know. I'd have liked to do Ophelia; but that was scarcely possible with my figure."
She sat down abruptly on a low deck chair which the vicar had dragged out. Her skirt was a barely sufficient covering when she stood up. It was very insufficient when she sat down in a low chair. She was conscious of that but not at all embarrassed.
"You simply couldn't have an Ophelia with legs like those," she said.
Sir Evelyn agreed with her, but was not obliged to say so, for Gladys's aunt put her head out of the kitchen window and shouted that luncheon was ready.
"Has Gladys come back with the beer?" said Mrs. Eames.
The aunt said she was at that moment coming in through the back door with a jug in her hand.
"I do hope it'll turn out that Gladys's aunt can make pancakes," said Mrs. Eames as they went into the house. "Gladys can't. But these things don't always run in families, which is a pity. If I could write for the papers like Beth—she is my niece, Sir Evelyn, not Timothy's—we might be quite rich. But I can't; which just shows that there's not so much in heredity as some people say, and proves that Gladys's aunt may be able to make pancakes. Anyhow, let's try."
Gladys, a failure as a cook and unwilling to make beds, appeared to be quite incompetent as a parlourmaid. Mrs. Eames was obliged to run round the table with plates and dishes, while Gladys, grinning foolishly, followed her with the beer. This gave Sir Evelyn a chance of resuming the monologue about smugglers' caves which had been interrupted by Mrs. Eames.
"There are," he said, "several hundred so-called smugglers' caves on the south coast of England. Few of them, perhaps not more than eighty or ninety altogether, were actually ever used for the storing of contraband goods. All the rest are spurious, advertised by the local hotel-keepers and railway companies as attractions to the trippers. They are rapidly becoming popular features of our watering-places. Picnic parties throng them. Campers pitch tents in their vicinity."