"Certainly! Certainly!"
"It will be unpleasant—this period of mourning that we shall have to affect—for his sake," she went on, "but it is out of respect for the neighborly proprieties, after all."
Mrs. Montgomery was looking at us all in turn, in some little perplexity, when a sudden recollection came to me of how difficult it is sometimes to amalgamate guests—no matter how many rooms there are to one's house.
"And I'll defer my visit until later?" I suggested.
She instantly smiled across at me.
"Just a few days—if you don't mind, dear," she said. "I had planned so many delightful things for your stay—and I know that you wouldn't enjoy the period of mourning."
"Not so much as you would if you had known Lord Erskine!" her husband put in wickedly. "And I'm determined to mourn only the briefest time possible."
"Not an hour later than Saturday!" his wife promised generously—and a few hours afterward when they put me down at Charing Cross and sent me whirling away to a lady-like hotel in Bloomsbury, it was with spoken, written and pantomime directions as to which trains, and what-timed trains—and how many trains I was to take toward the end of the week to get to Bannerley.
In the meanwhile I knuckled down devotedly to London—and sent my deductions home across seas, in neatly typed packets, to The Oldburgh Herald.