"Very good, sir," said Mr. Bowles.
CHAPTER VII
THE BROWNES ARRIVE
Contrary to all expectations, the Brownes arrived the next morning. The Deppinghams and their miserably frightened servants were scarcely out of bed when Saunders came in with the news that a steamer was standing off the shallow harbour. Bowles had telephoned up that the American claimant was on board.
Lady Agnes and her husband had not slept well. They heard noises from one end of the night to the other, and they were most unusual noises at that. The maids had flatly refused to sleep in the servants' wing, fully a block away, so they were given the next best suite of rooms on the floor, quite cutting off every chance the Brownes may have had for choice of apartments. Pong howled all night long, but his howls were as nothing compared to the screams of night birds in the trees close by.
The deepest gloom pervaded the household when Lady Deppingham discovered that not one of their retinue knew how to make coffee or broil bacon. Not that she cared for bacon, but that his lordship always asked for it when they did not have it. The evening before they had philosophically dined on tinned food. She brewed a delightful tea, and Antoine opened three or four kinds of wine. Altogether it was not so bad. But in the morning! Everything looked different in the morning. Everything always does, one way or another.
Bromley upset the last peg of endurance by hoping that the Americans were bringing a cook and a housemaid with them.
"The Americans always travel like lords," she concluded, forgetting that she served a lord, and not in the least intending to be ironical.