Ted Lancaster stood within the doorway and looked round the room with bewildered eyes.
Emerging from the lounge were a pair of long legs and a bit of skirt. Up on a step-ladder, in the corner, he discerned the Atom. From beneath the table trailed a piece of bright blue pinafore; that was all.
"I've told the handmaiden to hurry up with tea," came Denis's voice behind him.
The legs beneath the lounge wriggled spasmodically, and out came Molly, red and abashed. From the step-ladder descended the Atom, but Nell sat on, serene and absorbed, beneath the table.
"Where's Nell?" shouted Denis. "I say, bet you knocked that shelf down, old muddle-head! What ever's Nell sitting under the table for?"
Brought to the present, she crawled out.
"How-do-you-do?" she said in an absent sort of voice.
Ted looked at her. Her eyes were soft and looking far away; she quite forgot to remember how queer he must have thought it to find her sitting under the table. The suddenness of the change from the stream with its music in her ears, and the hills and the mist before her eyes, to the Stronghold was harsh, and made her feel bad. From her face he glanced to the queer old fossil to which her fingers were clinging with something of desperation in their hold, and he understood suddenly. He turned his broad shoulders on her.
"What were you doing under that lounge, Miss Molly? And you, Miss Sheila Patricia Kathleen O'Brien—surely you should not have been at the top of those steps?"
Sheila Pat's great eyes fairly glowered at him.