“I left it hanging in the entrance-hall. And I saw it on the rack as you and I came down the stairs before we went in to the Bidding Feast.”
“By gad, I remember it too,” he assented. “Then if—”
But he never finished that sentence, whose protases and apodoses might have filled an hour. Quick with surmise, we turned back to the house.
Millicent Mertoun and her retinue had by this time gone upstairs, but the Hall of the Moth was full of the women-servants of the house, arrayed in white as if risen from their graves in winding sheets. A small boy in a nightgown, scared half to death, was blubbering soulfully, as were some of the women. Blenkinson, the butler, the only man of them who had not got into clothes and gone forth, was quieting everyone with loud sibilance.
Pendleton confronted them somewhat nervously.
“There’s been too much racket about nothing,” he asserted. “Miss Mertoun walked a little in her sleep. That’s really all that’s happened. You’re all very silly, you see, to take on so. Now get to bed.”
But when they had departed he turned upon Eve Bartholomew with a face full of bale. “I can tell you one thing about Sir Brooke. If he doesn’t show up to-morrow and clear things up a bit, he’ll find no Bidding Feast when he gets here. I’ll invite ’em to clear out. I’m not going to have my guests hounded and threatened.”
Mrs. Bartholomew gasped. “Why, you can’t say that Sir Brooke has anything—”
“I don’t know,” scowled Pendleton, “but I want him—here!”
We are truly blissful marriage celebrators.