That is to say the nauseating statement about the prime middle cut at elevenpence a pound was what met the eye of the eager Miss Bibby.
An ebullition of anger such as rarely visited the gentle lady rose within her now.
She flung the card angrily into the fire.
"You are a very rude little girl, Pauline," she said; "it is excessively ill-bred to play jokes upon people older than yourself. And as for Larkin----"
But Larkin had disappeared, his shilling being earned, and some business urgently needing his attendance.
Pauline slipped away to the garden, a resigned look upon her face. She had not meant to be ill-bred; she had no idea she was playing a joke. But she remembered now that Miss Bibby had several times swept down the cards of Octavius that they had placed on the drawing-room mantelpiece as a means of attracting any visitors' custom to Larkin. Still she need not have spoken in that angry tone, and called her "ill-bred." "Ill-bred" was a very uncomfortable word to have suddenly thrust upon one. Pauline leapt up at the gymnastic bar, and swung and wriggled there to shake it off.
Hot and perspiring after several brilliant efforts, that included hanging by the feet, and swinging upwards again, and resuming the perpendicular, Pauline climbed up and sat on the bar, holding to a post and dangling her legs.
From here through a break in the trees she could see the hill, and climbing up it steadily, steadily, Miss Bibby with her long precious envelope for the post tucked beneath her arm.
Four days later Kate was reading, rocking and eating banana again in the privacy of the little side verandah, when there came a familiar tramp across the room behind her.
"It can't be Hugh," she said aloud, for it had been allowed by the whole party that the seven days of a week were not too long to devote to the thorough "doing" of the marvellous caves.
"By George though, can't it?" said that gentleman as he came through the doorway, dropped his bag on one chair, and sat down heavily on another.
Kate laughed at him outright; his linen suit was red over with fine dust, dust lay half an inch deep on the brim of his Panama, his very eyebrows were red with the molecules of the mountain roads.
"Well, my girl," he said, "it was worth it--well worth it. Blessed be motor-cars henceforth and forever, though hitherto I've never had a good word to throw at one. Great Scott! to think of it; but for the chance of one chap laying another fifty to a hundred that his car could do the journey down in ten minutes under the other chap's, those girls would be jabbering in my ears yet."