“Oh! did she?” I commented automatically, and cursed myself for having conveyed a warmth of interest I certainly did not feel.
“She’s so enthusiastic, isn’t she? Brenda, I mean,” Miss Tattersall went on, and as I listened I compared her to the stable-clock. She, too, was a persistent outrage, a hindrance to whatever it was that I was waiting for.
Mrs. Sturton and her husband were coming back, with an appearance of unwillingness, into the warmth and light of the Hall. The dear lady was still at her congratulations on the delightfulness of the evening, but they were tempered, now, by a hint of apology for “spoiling it—to a certain extent—I hope I haven’t—by this unfortunate contretemps.”
The Jervaises were uncomfortably warm in their reassurances. They felt, no doubt, the growing impatience of all their other visitors pressing forward with the reminder that if the Sturtons’ cab did not come at once, there would be no more dancing.
Half-way up the stairs little Nora Bailey’s high laughing voice was embroidering her statement with regard to the extra stroke of the stable-clock.
“I had a kind of premonition that it was going to, as soon as it began,” she was saying.
Gordon Hughes was telling the old story of the sentry who had saved his life by a similar counting of the strokes of midnight.
And at the back of my mind my dæmon was still thrusting out little spurts of enthralling allegory. The Sturtons and Jervaises had been driven in from the open. They were taking refuge in their house. Presently…
“Given it up?” I remarked with stupid politeness to Miss Tattersall.
“They’ve sent John round to the stables to inquire,” she told me.