“Well, I'll stay a few minutes on purpose to talk to you. But I hear Carteret coming downstairs. I don't want to meet him. I don't want to meet anybody—not even my sister.”
“Then I'll tell you what to do, sir. Go up the back staircase to your own room. It's just as you left it. No one will know you're here. I'll come to you as soon as I can.”
And he almost forced him through a folding-door into a passage communicating with the back staircase.
Chetwynd had disappeared before the attorney and his clerk reached the hall; but Mr. Carteret stopped for a moment to speak to the old butler.
“Ah, we've had a frightful scene, Norris!” he said. “It will surprise me if the old gentleman survives it. I suppose Mr. Chetwynd is gone?”
“I really can't say, sir. He was here a few minutes ago.”
“Looking rather wild, eh?”
“I'm sure he looked wild enough when he passed me just now,” observed the clerk. “I thought he'd have thrown me over the banisters.”
“Serve you right, too!” muttered Norris.
“Nothing could be more injudicious, and, I may add, more unfeeling, than his conduct to his father,” remarked Carteret.