"Yes, certainly. I say, Mr. Blair, is it true that there is fresh trouble coming about the Franchise affair-or shouldn't I ask that?"
Milford! thought Robert. How did they do it? A sort of information-pollen blown on the wind?
"Yes, I'm afraid there is," he said. "I expect they'll tell Stanley about it when he goes out tonight. Don't let him forget about the note, will you?"
"No, that's all right."
He wrote to The Franchise to say that Kevin Macdermott was coming down for Saturday night, and could he bring him out to see them on Sunday afternoon before he left to go back to town?
16
"Does Kevin Macdermott have to look like a tout when he comes to the country?" Nevil asked, the following evening as he and Robert waited for the guest to finish his ablutions and come down to dinner.
What Kevin in country clothes actually looked like, Robert considered, was a rather disreputable trainer of jumpers for the smaller meetings; but he refrained from saying that to Nevil. Remembering the clothes that Nevil had startled the countryside with for the last few years, he felt that Nevil was in no position to criticise anyone's taste. Nevil had turned up to dinner in a chaste dark grey suit of the most irreproachable orthodoxy, and seemed to think that his new conformity made him free to forget the experimentalism of his immediate past.
"I suppose Christina is in the usual lather of sentiment?"
"A lather of white of egg, as far as I have been able to judge."