“Yes, my dear, yes,” said the old gentleman, “I dare say I did. It is human to err, my dear, especially about dinner on a fine evening. Besides, I have made amends and brought you a visitor, our new neighbour, Colonel Quaritch. Colonel Quaritch, let me introduce you to my daughter, Miss de la Molle.”
“I think that we have met before,” said Harold, in a somewhat nervous fashion, as he stretched out his hand.
“Yes,” answered Ida, taking it, “I remember. It was in the long drift, five years ago, on a windy afternoon, when my hat blew over the hedge and you went to fetch it.”
“You have a good memory, Miss de la Molle,” said he, feeling not a little pleased that she should have recollected the incident.
“Evidently not better than your own, Colonel Quaritch,” was the ready answer. “Besides, one sees so few strangers here that one naturally remembers them. It is a place where nothing happens—time passes, that is all.”
Meanwhile the old Squire, who had been making a prodigious fuss with his hat and stick, which he managed to send clattering down the flight of stone steps, departed to get ready, saying in a kind of roar as he went that Ida was to order in the dinner, as he would be down in a minute.
Accordingly she rang the bell, and told the maid to bring in the soup in five minutes and to lay another place. Then turning to Harold she began to apologise to him.
“I don’t know what sort of dinner you will get, Colonel Quaritch,” she said; “it is so provoking of my father; he never gives one the least warning when he is going to ask any one to dinner.”
“Not at all—not at all,” he answered hurriedly. “It is I who ought to apologise, coming down on you like—like——”
“A wolf on the fold,” suggested Ida.