“It was so impossible to believe that she would do a thing like that,” his mother complained.
“Point is, what’s to be done now,” Ronnie said. “By gad, if I catch that chap, I’ll wring his neck.”
Mr. Jervaise, who was taking a lonely promenade up and down the far side of the Hall, looked up more hopefully at this threat.
“Oh! we can catch him,” Frank commented. “He has stolen the car, for one thing…” his inflection implied that catching Banks might be only the beginning of the trouble.
“Well, once we’ve got him,” returned Ronnie hopefully.
“Don’t be an ass,” Frank snubbed him. “We can’t advertise it all over the county that he has gone off with Brenda.”
“I don’t see…” Ronnie began, but Mrs. Jervaise interrupted him.
“It was so unfortunate that the Atkinsons should have been here,” she remarked.
“Every one will know, in any case,” Olive added.
Those avowals of their real and altogether desperate cause for distress raised the emotional tone of the two Jervaise women, and for the first time since I had come into the Hall, they looked at me with a hint of suspicion. They made me feel that I was an outsider, who might very well take this opportunity to withdraw.