Girlie confessed a small tin one labeled “Cass.”
“Very good, miss,” said the porter again.
The Lady of the Green Ulster stepped with calm audacity onto the platform. In a kind of trance Miss Fur Coat followed her.
The porter had no difficulty in retrieving three important looking trunks from the luggage van. Nor did the small tin one present any obstacle. When all the luggage had been duly collected, Elfreda marshaled Pikey and Miss Cass through the booking office and past the ticket collector into the station yard.
Several vehicles were waiting. Foremost of these was a stylish motor omnibus. Elfreda instinctively made a bee-line for it.
“Are you from Clavering Park?” she said to the smart footman with a wound stripe on his sleeve who stood by the open door.
The man said that he was from Clavering Park, whereon Miss Green Ulster pointed to the Fur Coat and informed him that its occupant was Lady Elfreda Catkin; whereon she was informed that there was a cart for the luggage, but owing to the shortage of petrol there was only the omnibus for everybody.
Miss Fur Coat, standing helpless and mazed in her borrowed plumes beside the omnibus door was hustled, literally hustled, into the interior of the vehicle, and Pikey, still far too drowsy even to begin to grapple with the situation in its strange complexity, was hustled in after her. While the porter put in rugs and umbrellas and a couple of the smaller cases under the competent direction of the lady who stood by the door of the omnibus, Pikey at the same time was adjured by her mistress in a stern whisper to play the game, to hold her tongue, and not to give anything away.
These instructions were Greek to the unfortunate Pikey in her present extremely somnolent condition. She made one feeble, rather despairing effort to come to grips with a matter that was frankly beyond her, but before she could rouse her will to any real activity the footman had been ordered to start.
“I am to wait, ma’am, for another guest.”