“Gone? Where?”
“With Sir Charles and her ladyship and Miss Vera and Judith.”
“I don’t understand you. What do you mean?”
“They went an hour ago, or more.”
“Went where?”
“Oh, ask me another. I don’t know.”
James in his cups was a very different person from sober, respectful, deferential James. And then it came back to me that, about an hour before, I had heard a car going down the avenue, and wondered whose it was.
The sound of loud, coarse laughter reached me from the kitchen.
“Well, all I says is it’s a pretty state of things,” a woman’s high, harsh voice exclaimed. I think it was the cook’s. “Cleared and gone with bags and baggage as if the devil hisself was after ’em.”
“P’r’aps ’e is,” a man’s voice, that I recognised as Henry’s, announced, and again came peals of laughter.