"Follow that!" said Edward Henry to the chauffeur, and nipped into his brougham again. Nobody had told him that the being in the shawl was Lord Woldo, but he was sure that it must be so.
In twenty minutes he saw Lord Woldo being carried to and fro amid the groves of Hyde Park (one of the few bits of London earth that did not belong to him nor to his more or less distant connections) while the carriage waited. Once Lord Woldo sat on a chair, but the chief nurse's lap was between him and the chair-seat. Both nurses chattered to him in Kensingtonian accents, but he offered no replies.
"Go back to 262," said Edward Henry to his chauffeur.
Arrived again in Eaton Square, he did not give himself time to be imposed upon by the grandiosity of the square in general nor of No. 262 in particular. He just ran up the steps and rang the visitors' bell.
"After all," he said to himself as he waited, "these houses aren't even semi detached! They're just houses in a row, and I bet every one of 'em can hear the piano next door!"
The butler whom he had previously caught sight of opened the great portal.
"Her ladyship--" began the formidable official.
"Now look here my man," said Edward Henry rather in desperation, "I must see Lady Woldo instantly. It's about the baby--"
He stepped into the sombre and sumptuous hall.
"Well," he reflected, "I am going it--no mistake!"
He was in a large back drawing-room, of which the window, looking north, was in rich stained glass. "No doubt because they're ashamed of the view," he said to himself. The size of the chimneypiece impressed him, and also its rich carving. "But what an old-fashioned grate!" he said to himself. "They need gilt radiators here." The doorway was a marvel of ornate sculpture, and he liked it. He liked too the effect of the oil-paintings--mainly portraits--on the walls, and the immensity of the brass fender, and the rugs, and the leatherwork of the chairs. But there could be no question that the room was too dark for the taste of any householder clever enough to know the difference between a house and a church.
There was a plunging noise at the door behind him.
"What's amiss?" he heard a woman's voice. And as he heard it he thrilled with sympathetic vibrations. It was not a North Staffordshire voice, but it was a South Yorkshire voice, which is almost the same thing. It seemed to him to be the first un-Kensingtonian voice to soothe his ears since he had left the Five Towns. Moreover, nobody born south of the Trent would have said, "What's amiss?" A Southerner would have said, "What's the matter?" Or, more probably, "What's the mattah?"