"All right, mother; Mr. Elmore doesn't want to hear you grumbling at me, I know."
Without waiting for her mother to continue her observations, Miss Joyce bustled out of the room with the breakfast tray in her hands. Left alone with him, the landlady addressed her lodger.
"What's the matter with the girl I can't think; I never saw anything like the change that's come over her the last few days; she looks more fit for a hospital than anything else--and her temper! She never says anything to me; I suppose you don't know what's wrong?"
"Mrs. Joyce, I'm not your daughter's confidant; she certainly says nothing to me in the sense you mean. Why do you take it for granted that anything's wrong?"
"Because I've got two eyes in my head, that's why. She's not the same girl she was; that something's wrong I'm certain sure; but she snaps my nose off directly I open my mouth. I know she thinks a lot of you. I wondered if she'd said anything to you."
"Absolutely nothing."
"Then I can't understand the girl, and that's flat!"
With that somewhat cryptic utterance Mrs. Joyce went out of the room as impetuously as she had entered. Rodney stood looking at the door for a moment or two, as if in doubt whether she would return. He tore the sheet of paper on which were the two typewritten lines into tiny scraps and dropped them into the fireplace. Re-reading Miss Carmichael's epistle, he obeyed her injunctions, a little tardily, perhaps, and sent the fragments after the others, repeating to himself as he did so a line from an old song:
"Of all the girls that are so sweet!"
Then he took an oblong piece of paper out of a letter-case and studied it.