“I seem to see your flight,” said Mr. Toomer. “And the newspaper placards and head-lines. ‘Lady Beach-Mandarin elopes with the wife of an eminent confectioner. She is stopped at the landing stage by the staff of the Dover Branch establishment. Recapture of the fugitive after a hot struggle. Brumley, the eminent littérateur, stunned by a spent bun....’”
“We’re all talking great nonsense,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin. “But anyhow we’ll make our call. And I know!—I’ll make her accept an invitation to lunch without him.”
“If she won’t?” threw out Mr. Roper.
“I will,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin with roguish determination. “And if I can’t——”
“Not ask him too!” protested Mr. Brumley.
“Why not get her to come to your Social Friends meeting,” said Miss Sharsper.
§2
When Mr. Brumley found himself fairly launched upon this expedition he had the grace to feel compunction. The Harmans, he perceived, had inadvertently made him the confidant of their domestic discords and to betray them to these others savoured after all of treachery. And besides much as he had craved to see Lady Harman again, he now realized he didn’t in the least want to see her in association with the exuberant volubility of Lady Beach-Mandarin and the hard professional observation, so remarkably like the ferrule of an umbrella being poked with a noiseless persistence into one’s eye, of Miss Sharsper. And as he thought these afterthoughts Lady Beach-Mandarin’s chauffeur darted and dodged and threaded his way with an alacrity that was almost distressing to Putney.
They ran over the ghost of Swinburne, at the foot of Putney Hill,—or perhaps it was only the rhythm of the engine changed for a moment, and in a couple of minutes more they were outside the Harman residence. “Here we are!” said Lady Beach-Mandarin, more capaciously gaminesque than ever. “We’ve done it now.”
Mr. Brumley had an impression of a big house in the distended stately-homes-of-England style and very necessarily and abundantly covered by creepers and then he was assisting the ladies to descend and the three of them were waiting clustered in the ample Victorian doorway. For some little interval there came no answer to the bell Mr. Brumley had rung, but all three of them had a sense of hurried, furtive and noiseless readjustments in progress behind the big and bossy oak door. Then it opened and a very large egg-shaped butler with sandy whiskers appeared and looked down himself at them. There was something paternal about this man, his professional deference was touched by the sense of ultimate responsibility. He seemed to consider for a moment whether he should permit Lady Harman to be in, before he conceded that she was.