“So do I,” agreed Fayre heartily. “I disliked the fellow at first, I admit, but now I’ve got a sneaking sympathy for him. He’s a loyal friend, whatever else he may be.”
“He’s a benighted idiot to cut and run now. I’d have given him credit for more sense. Was Cynthia with you when you saw him?”
“Yes. And I shall have my work cut out to prevent her from dashing up to town with me, I expect, once she knows what it all means. Which reminds me that if I don’t go and make a clean breast of the whole thing at once I shall never hear the last of it. It’s no good keeping it from her now.”
He departed hastily in search of her, but she was nowhere to be found and he concluded that she must have gone straight to her room. When she failed to put in an appearance at tea he was really puzzled. He knew she must be waiting eagerly for his explanation and it was not like her to curb anything, least of all curiosity. He was relieved to find that the Staveleys took her defection very calmly.
“If you knew Cynthia better you’d take everything she did as a matter of course,” announced Eve Staveley. “She’s probably gone home to collect a few more oddments.”
“If she hasn’t made a dash for the five-forty and caught it!” suggested Bill Staveley with a wicked gleam in his eye. “She can twist old Millar round her little finger and if she told him to keep the train till she arrived, I wouldn’t bank on his not doing it.”
“My dear Bill, why on earth should she go off on the five-forty?” demanded his wife.
“Why shouldn’t she? It’s just the sort of Tom Fool thing she would do,” he countered cheerfully.
The suggestion made Fayre uncomfortable and he went through a good deal of quite unnecessary worry before she walked calmly into the dining-room, ten minutes late for dinner, and apologized very prettily to her hostess for her unpunctuality.
Lady Staveley took it for granted that she had been to Galston and neither of the two men thought it wise to question the fact in public. After dinner, however, she found herself pinned into a corner of the big drawing-room, well out of hearing of her hostess, and made to give an account of herself.