Mr and Mrs Heath exchanged surprised glances, but Pamela was looking wonderingly at Mr Sigglesthorne's magnificent forehead, and did not move. Before any of them could speak Mr Sigglesthorne resumed:
"If Miss Pamela agrees to accept the offer she would be required to sign this paper, promising to obey certain instructions of Miss Crabingway's; but doubtless you would like to read it—I have it here in my pocket."
Mr Sigglesthorne stopped polishing his glasses, and resting them on the top of his hat, which lay on a chair beside him, he felt in his coat pocket. But his memory had played him false; it was the wrong pocket. He turned the contents out, but not finding what he sought he tried another pocket, fumbling with nervous, clumsy fingers, and producing various papers and envelopes and odd bits of string. The longer he searched the more nervous he got. "Tut! tut!" he kept saying to himself. "But how careless of me! Tut! tut! Exceedingly annoying!"
Mrs Heath tried to ease the situation by murmuring something polite, but Pamela was suddenly seized with an intense desire to start laughing. Mr Sigglesthorne looked so funny and perplexed, and he kept dropping his papers on the floor in his nervousness, and once he knocked his hat down, and the glasses too. Pamela, almost choking with the effort of keeping her face straight, was glad of the opportunity of rescuing the hat and placing it back on the chair; she was thankful to be able to do anything at all instead of sitting still and trying to keep serious. Mr Sigglesthorne's apologies and thanks for his hat were profuse.
At length, after going through five pockets, Mr Sigglesthorne found what he wanted, to everybody's relief.
"Perhaps I should mention," he said, as he handed an envelope across to Pamela, "that Miss Crabingway is inviting three other young girls—somewhere about Miss Pamela's age—to stay at her house also—but you will see about that, though, in the letter."
Pamela opened the envelope and spread out the sheet of paper it contained so that her mother and father could read it at the same time. It was a sheet of foolscap paper covered with black, spiky handwriting, writing which Mrs Heath recognized as Miss Emily Crabingway's from the Christmas card she received from her every year, the interchange of Christmas cards being the only communication she had held with this distant cousin of hers for the last twelve years.
"Read it aloud, Pamela," said her father. So Pamela read the following letter:
CHEQUERTREES,
BARROWFIELD,