Cora Prodmore, who had a great deal of colour in her cheeks and a great deal more—a bold variety of kinds—in the extremely high pitch of her new, smart clothes, meant, on the whole, it was easy to see, very little, and met this challenge with still less show of support either from the sources I have mentioned or from any others. A dull, fresh, honest, overdressed damsel of two-and-twenty, she was too much out of breath, too much flurried and frightened, to do more than stammer: “Waited, papa? Oh, I’m sorry!”
Her regret appeared to strike her father still more as an impertinence than as a vanity. “Would you then, if I had not had patience for you, have wished not to find me? Why the dickens are you so late?”
Agitated, embarrassed, the girl was at a loss. “I’ll tell you, papa!” But she followed up her pledge with an air of vacuity and then, dropping into the nearest seat, simply closed her eyes to her danger. If she desired relief, she had caught at the one way to get it. “I feel rather faint. Could I have some tea?”
Mr. Prodmore considered both the idea and his daughter’s substantial form. “Well, as I shall expect you to put forth all your powers—yes!” He turned to Chivers. “Some tea.”
The old man’s eyes had attached themselves to Miss Prodmore’s symptoms with more solicitude than those of her parent. “I did think it might be required!” Then as he gained the door of the morning-room: “I’ll lay it out here.”
The young lady, on his withdrawal, recovered herself sufficiently to rise again. “It was my train, papa—so very awfully behind. I walked up, you know, also, from the station—there’s such a lovely footpath across the park.”
“You’ve been roaming the country then alone?” Mr. Prodmore inquired.
The girl protested with instant eagerness against any such picture. “Oh, dear no, not alone!” She spoke, absurdly, as if she had had a train of attendants; but it was an instant before she could complete the assurance. “There were ever so many people about.”
“Nothing is more possible than that there should be too many!” said her father, speaking as for his personal convenience, but presenting that as enough. “But where, among them all,” he demanded, “is your trusty maid?”
Cora’s reply made up in promptitude what it lacked in felicity. “I didn’t bring her.” She looked at the old portraits as if to appeal to them to help her to remember why. Apparently indeed they gave a sign, for she presently went on: “She was so extremely unwell.”