"In the cock-loft."
"Wherever's that?"
"The cistern-room. He's doin' photigraphs in the dark."
Now I felt that Dimbie was acting very basely. He had seen Mrs. Winderby coming through the gate. He had rapidly taken his bearings, and was now in hiding in a cock-loft.
"Will you tell the master tea is ready, and that I am anxious to introduce him to Mrs. Winderby," I said to Amelia.
"Yes, mum."
Mrs. Winderby sat down again appeased. She graciously accepted a cup of tea, which she said must be just milk and water on account of her nerves, and she skilfully brought round the conversation to a man with a name which sounded like a sneeze, whom I knew nothing about. She talked of him, quoted him, raved about him. "He was a dear, naughty philosopher, and his philosophy drove him mad," she finished, and I covertly made a note on the fly-leaf of a book which lay beside me: "Niet or Ntiez, man who went mad." I intended looking him up in the encyclopædia. Mrs. Winderby might call and talk of this sneezy philosopher again, and I must know something about him.
She detected me in my note-making.
"What are you doing?" she inquired.
"I was only jotting something down."