MADAME FORSYTH COMES HOME
"No. I judge from all your faces no one expected me!" exclaimed Madame Forsyth coldly, extending to Cornelius Allendyce the tips of her fingers. "Harkness, you look as though you were seeing a ghost!"
Her rebuking words had the effect of galvanizing poor Harkness' limbs to action—but not his tongue. Though he hobbled down the steps and took the bag from the lawyer's hand, not a word could he speak from sheer stupefaction.
And Hannah Budge so forgot her long years of loyalty to the House of Forsyth as to cry out—"Oh, Miss Robin!" before so much as one word of greeting for Madame Forsyth.
"You could 'a clean knocked me over," she explained to Harkness afterward, "Our Madame going away as fine as you please with that baggage of a Florrie who was as full of tricks as a cat after a mouse, and coming back in that old car that had moss on it, I do believe, and with Miss Robin, too, who they all thought was lost though I knew better. Something told me to beat up that cake yesterday!"
"And Miss Robin didn't know Madame was Madame," explained Harkness, his face perplexed. "She and Miss Beryl here've been thinking she was some mysterious lydy or other—Williams says they got it in their little heads she was a Queen hiding—"
"Madame hiding where?" snorted Budge.
"Well, I can't make nothing out of it. My head goes 'round in a circle like. Only Williams says that lydy must be the lydy the young lydies visited, mysterious like, just afore Christmas and the lydy's our Madame all right and that's what I say my head goes 'round in a circle!"
"Your tongue, too, Timothy Harkness. Well, there's lots going to happen now, or my name ain't Hannah Budge. First thing, I s'pose, she'll clear that Castle young 'un out of the house and then your Miss Beryl. And mebbe send Miss Robin off to school somewheres to get these common notions out o' her little head. You say they're all talking upstairs now?"
"Only Madame and the lawyer man. Mr. Granger's gone down to the Mills to send word to his home that Miss Robin's found."