“What’s up now, do you suppose?” Miss Tattersall asked, with the least tremor of excitement sounding in her voice.
“Perhaps the chauffeur has followed the example of Carter, and afterwards hidden his shame,” I suggested.
I was surprised by the warmth of her contradiction. “Oh, no” she said. “He isn’t the least that sort of man.” She said it as if I had aspersed the character of one of her friends.
“He seems to have gone, disappeared, any-way,” I replied.
“It’s getting frightfully mysterious,” Miss Tattersall agreed, and added inconsequently, “He’s got a strong face, you know; keen—looks as if he’d get his own way about things, though, of course, he isn’t a gentleman.”
I had a suspicion that she had been flirting with the romantic chauffeur. She was the sort of young woman who would flirt with any one.
I wished they would open that Hall door again. The action of my play had become dispersed and confused. Frank Jervaise had gone off through the baize door with John, and the Sturtons and their host and hostess were moving reluctantly towards the drawing-room.
“We might almost as well go and sit down somewhere,” I suggested to Miss Tattersall, and noted three or four accessible blanks on the staircase.
“Almost,” she agreed after a glance at the closed door that shut out the night.
In the re-arrangement I managed to leave her on a lower step, and climbed to the throne of the gods, at present occupied only by Gordon Hughes, one of Frank Jervaise’s barrister friends from the Temple. Hughes was reputed “brilliantly clever.” He was a tallish fellow with ginger red hair and a long nose—the foxy type.