For the moment, so far as I was concerned, the query was unanswerable. She triumphantly continued:
‘Instead of doing what most did, when they’d had enough of hammering, and going away, these three they went round to the back, and I’m blessed if they mustn’t have got through the kitchen window, woman and all, for all of a sudden the blind in the front room was pulled not up, but down—dragged down it was, and there was that young man what’s a friend of yours standing with it in his hand.
‘“Well,” I says to myself, “if that ain’t cool I should like to know what is. If, when you ain’t let in, you can let yourself in, and that without so much as saying by your leave, or with your leave, things is coming to a pretty pass. Wherever can that Arab party be, and whatever can he be thinking of, to let them go on like that because that he’s the sort to allow a liberty to be took with him, and say nothing, I don’t believe.”
‘Every moment I expects to hear a noise and see a row begin, but, so far as I could make out, all was quiet and there wasn’t nothing of the kind. So I says to myself, “There’s more in this than meets the eye, and them three parties must have right upon their side, or they wouldn’t be doing what they are doing in the way they are, there’d be a shindy.”
‘Presently, in about five minutes, the front door opens, and a young man—not the one what’s your friend, but the other—comes sailing out, and through the gate, and down the road, as stiff and upright as a grenadier,—I never see anyone walk more upright, and few as fast. At his heels comes the young man what is your friend, and it seems to me that he couldn’t make out what this other was a-doing of. I says to myself, “There’s been a quarrel between them two, and him as has gone has hooked it.” This young man what is your friend he stood at the gate, all of a fidget, staring after the other with all his eyes, as if he couldn’t think what to make of him, and the young woman, she stood on the doorstep, staring after him too.
‘As the young man what had hooked it turned the corner, and was out of sight, all at once your friend he seemed to make up his mind, and he started off running as hard as he could pelt,—and the young woman was left alone. I expected, every minute, to see him come back with the other young man, and the young woman, by the way she hung about the gate, she seemed to expect it too. But no, nothing of the kind. So when, as I expect, she’d had enough of waiting, she went into the house again, and I see her pass the front room window. After a while, back she comes to the gate, and stands looking and looking, but nothing was to be seen of either of them young men. When she’d been at the gate, I daresay five minutes, back she goes into the house,—and I never saw nothing of her again.’
‘You never saw anything of her again?—Are you sure she went back into the house?’
‘As sure as I am that I see you.’
‘I suppose that you didn’t keep a constant watch upon the premises?’
‘But that’s just what I did do. I felt something queer was going on, and I made up my mind to see it through. And when I make up my mind to a thing like that I’m not easy to turn aside. I never moved off the chair at my bedroom window, and I never took my eyes off the house, not till you come knocking at my front door.’