If my sister have a child then am I straightway
an uncle, and who shall save me?
When Diana took up her abode in the house of her uncle, she arrived late, dressed, and went out again to dinner. That was not how Marcus would have had her arrive. She must understand that order was the keynote of his establishment. How otherwise could he expect to keep so excellent a housekeeper as Mrs. Oven? Pillar, too, must be considered. She must state definitely when she would be in to dinner and when not.
“I was not,” she said later, when taxed, “definitely not.”
Marcus dined alone. As he came downstairs dressed for dinner, he met a housemaid going up, with a glass of milk on a tray. On the tray there was also a plate, on the plate there was a banana, and beside the banana lay glistening a halfpenny bun. The meal of some one’s particular choosing, he should say. In no other way could it have found its way upstairs in his house. But whose meal was it?
That he had two housemaids he knew. He saw evidence of their being in the brightness of the brasses, the polish of the furniture, but he hardly knew them apart. The bun-bearer was one of them. He went on his way deploring that in his house there was no back staircase. But for whom could a vagrant banana be?
Tentatively he put the question to Pillar, as ashamed to ask it as Pillar was to answer it. Pillar murmured something about a mischance, and Mr. Maitland was quick to admit it. It was certainly an accident meeting the banana on the stairs; but the meal itself remained unexplained, and inexcused; it must have been predestined. Then it struck him that Diana must have brought a maid. It was quite right she should. He might have guessed it. But a maid who lived on buns and bananas, could she be efficient?
Marcus dined uncomfortably. The dinner seemed less good than usual. Gradually it was borne in upon him that it must be Mrs. Oven who was in bed and who was feeding on buns and bananas. She had lost her taste, her sense, her gastronomic taste—her sense of taste. Everything!
Towards twelve o’clock Diana came in, unrepentant and delightful; she floated in, as it were, on a cloud of tulle, a veritable will-o’-the-wisp, a thing as light as gossamer, as elusive as a firefly. She had a great deal to tell Marcus and told him none of it. She was lost in the depth of his huge sofa—she looked like drifted snow—blown there by the wind. He didn’t tell her that, even if he thought it. What he did tell her was that he expected his guests to go to bed early. This in obedience to an instinct that told him to begin as he meant to go on—
Diana said she could not go to bed early—that night, at all events. She would go as early as she could—as early in the morning. “I have a confession to make. Shall I make it now or wait till to-morrow? In ten minutes it will be to-morrow. To-morrow never used to come so soon.”