"I'm sorry if I annoyed you just now, Syl," he said. "That dashed little detective is to blame. He does put things in such a beastly unpleasant way."
"What things?"
"Why, about you and me and all of us. Gave me a regular lecture because I went back to town this morning. I couldn't help it, old girl. I really couldn't. I had to settle some urgent business, but that's all ended now. The pater's death has steadied me. No more gallivanting off to London for me. Settle down in Roxton, Board of Guardians on Saturdays, church on Sunday, tea and tennis at the vicarage, and 'you-come-to-our-place-tomorrow.' You know the sort of thing—old-fashioned, respectable and comfy. I'll sell my motor bike and start a car. Motor bikes make a fellow a bit of a vagabond—eh, what? They will go the pace. You can't stop 'em. Fifty per, and be hanged to the police, that's their motto."
"It sounds idyllic," the girl forced herself to say lightly, but her teeth met with a snap, and her fingers gripped the rough surface of the stones, for she remembered how Trenholme had said of her that she "reveled in the sunlight, in the golden air, in the scents of trees and shrubs and flowering grasses."
There was a musical cadence in her voice that restored Robert's surly good humor; he was of that peculiar type of spoiled youth whose laugh is a guffaw and whose mirth ever holds a snarl.
"Here comes your paint slinger," he said. "Wonder if he really can stage a decent picture. If so, when the present fuss is ended we'll get him to do a group. You and me and the keepers and dogs in front of the Warren Covert, next October, after a big drive. How would that be?"
"I'm sure Mr. Trenholme will feel flattered."
When Trenholme approached he was not too well pleased to find Miss Manning in charge of a new cavalier.
From items gathered earlier in the village he guessed the newcomer's identity. Perhaps he expected that the girl would offer an introduction, but she only smiled pleasantly and said: