"Why, Frankie, I don't take it to be very kind of you not to be taking any notice of me at all. Scotland Yard! you're not Frankie! You're old enough to be his grandpa!" She returned to Stanley Brock; as if the fault were his. "What are you giving us? This isn't my Frank! I'm not collecting fossils just yet, if it's all the same to you."
What the General felt--and his friend the hostess--history does not recount. Silence had settled down on the assembly which was more eloquent than any ribald laughter could possibly have been; it was the silence of stupefaction. It meant that everyone was on tenterhooks as to what was the next thing which this extraordinary person--who had dropped from the clouds--would do or say. Screwing his courage to the sticking point, Frank did his best to rescue his friends from an impossible situation. Advancing towards the dreadful stranger, he addressed her with what one is bound to admit was a voice which trembled.
"Good afternoon, Miss Lorraine."
She looked at him with a glance which was both impudent and mischievous.
"Miss Lorraine! What ho! So you've turned up at last; and now you have turned up you don't seem over hearty. I say, Frankie dear, I wish you'd give me a hand with my baggage. These brown-paper parcels contain pretty nearly everything I've got in the world; my evening dress is in this one. Such a oner! you wait till you see it, you'll stare! Being tumbled about anyhow on the grass won't do it any good. Help me to put the whole lot of it straight, there's a dear."
She was stooping over her collection of miscellaneous rubbish with the apparent intention of piling it into something like a symmetrical heap. Frank showed commendable presence of mind.
"If you will walk with me up to the house, we will send a servant down, and have it all placed in your room."
Miss Lorraine showed no desire to associate herself with his plan to remove her, at anyrate, temporarily, from the scene.
"I'm not going to walk up to the house with you, not much I'm not. Where I am I'll stay. Look here, Frank, if these people are your friends you introduce them to your future wife; I don't like being among a lot of folks and not know who's who. It don't seem sociable. And where's your mother? You promised to introduce me to the old lady the very first chance you had."
The "old lady" thus delicately referred to--who was herself of opinion that she was still very far from being old--cast at her son such a glance that he became immediately conscious that compliance with Miss Lorraine's request was altogether out of the question. He ingeniously shirked it.