"Why, it's never Mr. Roche!" she exclaims.
"Yes," he replies; "I have come for Eleanor. Where is she?"
Mrs. Grebby sinks on to the seat in the porch, and stares at him open-mouthed.
"What do yer mean?" she gasps at last. "There ain't no harm come to my dearie!"
She wrings her hands despairingly.
"Has Eleanor left you?" he asks in a voice so strangely unfamiliar that he hardly knows it for his own.
"Three days ago. She went 'ome, to be sure, as bright and as bonny as could be, looking that pretty, I says to my old man 'It's well she's not travellin' alone.'"
"Who was with her?" questions Philip intently, mastering his intense emotion.