"And we are glad," said Priscilla, gently. "And we're quite sorry that the rain is over so that we have no excuse for--for--oh, yes, trespassing on your hospitality."
"But you have only shown me one of the rooms, and there are about forty others, I believe. Think of me getting lost in a rabbit warren of bedrooms and dressing-rooms and still rooms and sparkling! Wouldn't it be on your conscience if you heard of that happening?"
"Our conscience--Mr. Wingfield takes it for granted that we have only one conscience between us," said Priscilla.
"And perhaps he thinks that he's generous," said Rosa.
They did it very nicely, he thought. They were really very charming--not a bit like any other girls he had ever met.
"You don't need a conscience, I'll bet," he said. "What do you ever do to keep it up to its work?"
"If we stay here another five minutes it will be working overtime," laughed Priscilla. "Good-bye, Mr. Wingfield, and receive our thanks for shelter, and a--a--most unusual afternoon."
"Good-bye. You have done a particularly good turn to a chap to-day, and don't you forget it. I'll go to the door with you."
He walked with them to the pillared porch and said another good-bye in a different key.
They heard him close the hall door, and they knew that he would have to go to a window of the dining-room if he wished to watch them departing on the carriage drive.
They wondered--each of them on her own account--if he had hurried to that particular window.
"He is not so silly as he promised to be the first five minutes we came upon him," said Rosa, when they were approaching the entrance gates.
"Not nearly. As a matter of fact I found him entertaining."
"Perhaps not. I'm not sure that I am entertained by intellectual entertainment. He is a man in the clay stage. I'm not sure that that isn't the most interesting--it certainly is the most natural. He might be anything that a woman might choose to make him."
"Of course we'll tell them at home what happened," said Rosa, after a long pause.
"Why should we not? We would do well to be an hour or two in advance of Mrs. Pearce," said Priscilla.
They got upon the road, and were forced to pay attention to its condition of muddiness rather than to the delight of breathing the sweet scents of the rain-drenched hedges on each side. They parted at the cross-roads, and only at that moment remembered that they had left their primroses in the porch.