It evidently did shock Sir Humphrey. He said that perhaps she had scarcely had time to realise what had happened. Her smile was a little scornful, but she did not argue the point. On the question of her return to London she was inclined to be vague; purposely, Felicity guessed. There appeared to be business connected with Ivy Cottage which she would be obliged to settle.
She made no effort to detain her visitors when Felicity rose to go. Felicity thought, privately, that whatever she might choose to say, she was suffering from considerable strain. Her eyes betrayed her.
Sir Humphrey, on the way home, took no pains to disguise the fact that he did not like Shirley. His sense of propriety was offended by her lack of hypocrisy; he could not forgive such plain speaking, however unsatisfactory Mark Brown might have been. Decency had to be preserved. He thought that the absence of mourning clothes showed lack of respect towards the dead. Whatever a man's character had been in life, death, in Sir Humphrey's eyes, made him instantly respectable.
In the middle of these reflections he broke off to hunt on the seat beside him for something. Felicity slowed down. "What is it, Daddy?"
"I seem," said Sir Humphrey with annoyance, "to have left that book I borrowed at the Boar's Head. I can't think how I could have done such a thing. We shall have to go back."
Leaving things behind was a habit he had so often condemned in his wife and daughter that Felicity could not forbear a little crow of laughter as she turned the car.
Ten minutes' run brought them back to the Boar's Head. Sir Humphrey went into the lounge where he found Shirley sitting alone, the book on the small table before her. She was flushed, and when she looked up at his approach, he was surprised to see so much light in her dark eyes. Upon his soul, the girl looked as though she had come into a fortune instead of having lost her only brother.
She got up, lifting the book from the table. "You left this behind, didn't you?" she said. "I've been dipping into it. Also dusting it, which it badly needed." She put it into his hands. "Here you are."
"And what did you think of it?" said Sir Humphrey.
A little smile hovered on her lips. "It seems to have some very interesting things in it," she said. Amberley was not in to lunch, having gone over to Carchester to confer with the chief constable, but he put in an appearance at tea-time, not in the best of tempers. An effort on Sir Humphrey's part to read aloud to him an anecdote about the Abbe Marolles was firmly checked at the outset. "I've read it," said Mr. Amberley.