"Lord Quorn?" she said, with a brave attempt at a successful smile. "Surely this is not Lord Quorn?"
"I'm nobody else," Quorn assured her bluffly.
"How very singular," said Lady Ormstork icily, "that you should not have known it."
"Not at all," rejoined Lady Agatha promptly. "We have for weeks past understood this gentleman was Lord Quorn."
"I didn't like to contradict you," said Gage on being indicated.
Lady Agatha, for once too dumfounded for speech, could only give a significant look of appeal to her daughters. And at the look John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook, who had taken the precaution to get near the door, opened it quietly and slipped out.
Meanwhile the brown eyes of Miss Ethel and the black orbs of Miss Dagmar were fastened searchingly on Lord Quorn, and they transmitted to their owners the impression that he was not an attractive personage. In truth there was yet a good deal of the Jenkins about him. His clothes looked as though he had been in the habit of going to bed in them, and his hair cried out for the barber. For the moment, at any rate, he was not to be jumped at, and with that conviction the original impulse to spring was stilled. Lady Agatha rose, with a lofty ignoring of Lady Ormstork's exultant smile.
"If," she said to Gage, "you are not Lord Quorn, as you have all along thought proper to pretend to be, may one ask who you are?"
"I am Peter Gage," he answered with a touch of amusement.
The eyes of Lady Agatha and her daughters met, and all that could be read in them was an indignant perplexity.