"Time?" demanded Miss Penny, as they passed along the verandah.
"Then you are half an hour late for your dinner. I propose that we ask Mrs. Carré to serve us all together to-night," said Miss Penny, "or we may all fare the worse."
"I shall be delighted," began Graeme exuberantly, "unless--" and he snapped a glance at Miss Brandt.
"We shall be glad if you will join us," she said quickly.
"I will be there in two minutes," he said, and sped up the Red House stairs to make ready.
"I hope to goodness he won't," said Miss Penny, as they passed through the hedge. "Now don't you say a word to me, Margaret Brandt. It was you invited him"
"'We shall be glad if you will join us.' If that isn't an invitation I'd like to know what it is. And I heard you say it with my own two ears,--moi qui vous parle, as we say here."
"You know perfectly well that I could not possibly do anything else, Hennie. I believe you just did it on purpose. I don't know what's come over you."
"John Graeme. I like him. And after all he'd done for us--that Coupée, and Venus's Bath, and the Souffleur, and he like to lose his dinner over it all! What could a kind motherly person like me do but suggest--simply suggest, in the vaguest manner possible--"
"Yes?--" as she stopped in a challenging way.
"I merely threw out the suggestion, I say, in the vaguest possible way, that as we were nearly dying of hunger he should allow us to ask Mrs. Carré to let us have our dinner half an hour earlier than usual--"
"And then you struck in, in your usual lordly fashion, and begged him to join us. And I'm bound to say he took it very well, not to say jumped at it."
"Yes, I know. And if I live I'll be a be-a, and perhaps more besides,"--with a cryptic nod.
"Wait patiently, my child, and you'll see."
"I believe the Sark air is affecting your--whatever you've got inside that giddy head of yours."
"Of course it is. That's what I came for, and to keep you out of mischief, you infantile law-breaker."
Graeme's two minutes were each set with considerably more than the regulation sixty seconds--diamond seconds of glowing anticipation, every one of them. And, to his credit, be it recorded that he allotted several of them to the invocation of most fervent blessings on Miss Penny, who, at the moment, was vigorously disclaiming any pretension thereto.