“You might almost be said to be pleased,” was the sad comment of George Norris at the end of their thrilling story. And he was such a very simple young man that the sound of his voice suggested tears.
“What do you think?” The idiom of Miss Joan was a little primitive, no doubt—she took after her father’s side, poor dear child! “She a perfect beast, isn’t she, Pe-tah?”
“A norrible beast,” Petah agreed.
But in the eyes of George Norris there was a look that seemed to contradict them flatly.
He was such a naïf young man that the lurid story of the morning’s war, which to be sure lost nothing in the telling, came as quite a shock. And the shock left him sore, rueful, angry. He was not at all inclined to accept the tale in all its nakedness—things had been left out, things had been put in—and as he had known from the first, these unsportsmanlike women had had “an awful down” on the little governess.
The crux of the matter was that she was a rather special kind of governess. Only too evidently she was used to the best people and the best houses. George Norris was too good a sportsman himself to be hard upon Mrs. T.-S. from whom he had received many kindnesses or upon Miss P. who was by way of being a dasher, but the trouble with these ladies was that they were quite unable to forgive Miss Cass her trick of making them look cheap. A minx, of course, a perfectly charming minx who spent her time scoring them off. She had deserved all she had got. But as man is the being he is in the world of the present, George Norris would have liked beyond all things just now to have knocked the heads of Master Peter and Miss Joan together.
The young man in his distress, which he had neither the art nor the tact to conceal, sought Mrs. Trenchard-Simpson. He found her seated at a writing table in the morning room. And flanking her, in a low chair by the fire, was Miss Parbury poring over with an air of intense absorption, the intricate pages of Bradshaw’s Guide.
“There’s a train at a quarter-past two, I see,” Miss Parbury announced as General Norris entered the room.
“That is the one. She must go by that.” Mrs. Trenchard-Simpson dipped her pen augustly. “Tell me, what’s the date, dear?”
Miss Parbury had a doubt as to the date, but General Norris succinctly furnished it from the top of The Times newspaper which providentially was at hand.