"Yes?" Charlotte sounded as he paused.
"Why I shouldn't know what to think!"
"Oh I see." She had met him with a certain blankness,
but adequately enough, it seemed, for him to regard the
subject as dismissed; and there was no reversion to it
between them before, on the morrow, when she had
with difficulty made a place for them in her trunk, she
carried off these florid survivals.
At Bleet she found small occasion to revert to them and,
in an air charged with such quite other references, even
felt, after she had laid them away, much enshrouded,
beneath various piles of clothing, that they formed a
collection not wholly without its note of the ridiculous.
Yet she was never, for the joke, tempted to show them to
her pupils, though Gwendolen and Blanche in particular
always wanted, on her return, to know what she had
brought back; so that without an accident by which the
case was quite changed they might have appeared to
enter on a new phase of interment. The essence of the
accident was the sudden illness, at the last moment, of
Lady Bobby, whose advent had been so much counted
on to spice the five days' feast laid out for the coming
of age of the eldest son of the house; and its equally
marked effect was the dispatch of a pressing message,
in quite another direction, to Mrs. Guy, who, could she
by a miracle be secured--she was always engaged ten
parties deep--might be trusted to supply, it was believed,
12
HYLAND
