“You gave me quite a fright, uncle,” the red-haired girl was saying, “when I saw you out there in the dark. Whatever were you doing ?”
“Oh—er—nothing much,” said Mr. Morgan, who had evidently not given himself away, “just having a look round,—er—just having a look round at the garden before I came in.”
“We thought you weren’t coming back till to-morrow.”
“I hadn’t meant to.”
“You don’t mind us having had the rehearsal here, do you?”
“Not a bit, my dear. Not a bit.”
“The real reason we didn’t tell you was that we knew you were just a bit nervous of communists and things like that. I told the others so that day we arranged it—the day that boy was here.”
“What boy?” said Mr. Morgan sharply.
“Oh, a poor boy we picked up on the road unconscious and nearly dead, and Freddie examined him and found that he was suffering from some terrible disease of the spine.”
Mr. Morgan’s sniff expressed no great respect for Freddie’s diagnosis.