Joe Kenyon nodded. "Oh, of course, of course," he said. "Hubert told him all about it this afternoon."
"About what, Joe?" Miss Kenyon put in, speaking for the first time. She gave him no indication of perturbation or anxiousness, but she was reading her brother's face as if she sought some evidence of his secret motive.
"Well, about the engagement, and having no money and so on," Joe Kenyon rather desperately explained.
"No money?" his sister returned, with a lift of her eyebrows. "What do you mean, by having no money?"
"Well, Hubert hasn't any, not of his own," her brother replied. "And he was saying, I gather, that he would like—well—a change of air if he were married. About enough of us here, without him, perhaps. That sort of thing. And Arthur very generously offered through me to lend him a couple of hundred pounds if he wanted it."
Whether or not he had intended to create a diversion by this further announcement, he had certainly achieved that object.
Turner gave an exclamation of surprise, but it was Mrs Kenyon who answered.
"Oh, but we couldn't possibly accept that," in an agitated voice; and Arthur, looking down, saw that her hands were trembling. She was, he realised then, by far the most nervous of the five, and he recognised in her at that moment a strong likeness to his own mother. She, too, had been a timid woman, apprehensive not only of danger, but also of change. Miss Kenyon had let her work fall in her lap, and was sitting, plunged, apparently, in a fit of deep abstraction.
"No, no, of course not," Joe Kenyon replied. "I have already refused that."