This was Mr Cox. The retort was hardly courteous.
'You be hanged!'
Mr Burton reached the front door as the knocking was recommencing. From where they were they could not see what he did, but they could hear. They heard him open; a feminine voice inquire, in tones of indignation,--
'What's the meaning of this? Why am I kept waiting?'
Then the front door slammed, the drawing-room door was thrown violently open, and two young ladies came through it, one after the other, with such extremely indecorous rapidity as to suggest that they could scarcely be entirely responsible for their own proceedings, as, indeed, they were not. Mr Horace Burton had propelled them forward with his own right arm before they themselves had the least idea what was about to happen. And, following right upon their heels, he closed the drawing-room door, turned the key and stood with his back against it, surveying them with his habitual, benignant smile.
It was what they call upon the stage a tableau, The smiling gentleman, the two bewildered ladies, the two other almost equally bewildered men, for it was an open question which were the more surprised by the singularity of Mr Burton's behaviour--Miss Bewicke and Miss Broad or Mr Thomas Cox and the Flyman.
The peculiar nature of her reception seemed to have driven Miss Broad's wits completely from her. She gazed around like a woman startled out of sleep, who has no notion of what has roused her. Miss Bewicke had apparently retained some fragments of hers. She looked at Mr Burton, then at Mr Cox and the Flyman, then back at the gentleman who stood before the door. She eyed him up and down with a mixture, as it seemed, of amusement, anger and contempt. Could a voice have stung, hers would have stung him then. But this gentleman was pachydermatous.
'So it's you?'
'I guess it is.'
'How dare you come here?'