“What the devil is it?”
The old man showed the shock, but he had his duty. “Another party.”
Mrs. Gracedew, at this, wheeled round. “The ‘party up’!” It brought back her voice—indeed, all her gaiety. And her gaiety was always determinant. “Show them in.”
Clement Yule’s face fell while Chivers proceeded to obey. “You’ll have them?” he wailed across the hall.
“Ah! mayn’t I be proud of my house?” she tossed back at him.
At this, radiant, he had rushed at her. “Then you accept——?”
Her raised hand checked him. “Hush!”
He fell back—the party was there. Chivers ushered it as he had ushered the other, making the most, this time, of more scanty material—four persons so spectacled, satchelled, shawled, and handbooked that they testified on the spot to a particular foreign origin and presented themselves indeed very much as tourists who, at an hotel, casting up the promise of comfort or the portent of cost, take possession, while they wait for their keys, with expert looks and free sounds. Clement Yule, who had receded, effacing himself, to the quarter opposed to that of his companion, addressed to their visitors a covert but dismayed stare and then, edging round, in his agitation, to the rear, instinctively sought relief by escape through the open passage. One of the invaders meanwhile—a broad-faced gentleman with long hair tucked behind his ears and a ring on each forefinger—had lost no time in showing he knew where to begin. He began at the top—the proper place, and took in the dark pictures ranged above the tapestry. “Olt vamily bortraits?”—he appealed to Chivers and spoke very loud.
Chivers rose to the occasion and, gracefully pawing the air, began also at the beginning. “Dame Dorothy Yule—who lived to a hundred and one.”
“A hundred and one—ach so!” broke, with a resigned absence of criticism, from each of the interested group; another member of which, however, indicated with a somewhat fatigued skip the central figure of the series, the personage with the long white legs that Mrs. Gracedew had invited the previous inquirers to remark. “Who’s dis?” the present inquirer asked.