"You sound quite pettish, dear. I think you are allowing the thing to get on your nerves. Why don't you take tomorrow afternoon off and arrange a golf four? You have hardly golfed at all lately and it can't be good for your liver. Not golfing, I mean."
"I can't believe," Robert said wonderingly, "that I was ever interested in the fate of 'a piece of gutta-percha' on a golf course. That must have been in some other life."
"That is what I say, dear. You are losing your sense of proportion. Allowing this affair to worry you quite unnecessarily. After all, you have Kevin."
"That I take leave to doubt."
"What do you mean, dear?"
"I can't imagine Kevin taking time off and travelling down to Norton to defend a case that he is fore-ordained to lose. He has his quixotic moments, but they don't entirely obliterate his common sense."
"But Kevin promised to come."
"When he made that promise there was still time for a defence to materialise. Now we can almost count the days to the Assizes and still we have no evidence-and no prospect of any."
Miss Bennet eyed him over her soup spoon. "I don't think, you know, dear," she said, "that you have enough faith."
Robert refrained from saying that he had none at all. Not, anyhow, where divine intervention in the Franchise affair was concerned.