"I've heard that puzzle before!" cried Lambert. "And I'll tell you the explanation. When a ship goes round the world from east to west, we know that it loses a day in its reckoning: so that when it gets home, and calls its day Wednesday, it finds people here calling it Thursday, because we've had one more midnight than the ship has had. And when you go the other way round you gain a day."
"I know all that," said Hugh, in reply to this not very lucid explanation: "but it doesn't help me, because the ship hasn't proper days. One way round, you get more than twenty-four hours to the day, and the other way you get less: so of course the names get wrong: but people that live on in one place always get twenty-four hours to the day."
"I suppose there _is_ such a place," Balbus said, meditatively, "though I never heard of it. And the people must find it very queer, as Hugh says, to have the old day _east_ of them, and the new one _west_: because, when midnight comes round to them, with the new day in front of it and the old one behind it, one doesn't see exactly what happens. I must think it over."
So they had entered the house in the state I have described--Balbus puzzled, and Lambert buried in gloomy thought.
"Yes, m'm, Master _is_ at home, m'm," said the stately old butler. (N.B.--It is only a butler of experience who can manage a series of three M's together, without any interjacent vowels.) "And the _ole_ party is a-waiting for you in the libery."
"I don't like his calling your father an _old_ party," Mad Mathesis whispered to her niece, as they crossed the hall. And Clara had only just time to whisper in reply "he meant the _whole_ party," before they were ushered into the library, and the sight of the five solemn faces there assembled chilled her into silence.
Her father sat at the head of the table, and mutely signed to the ladies to take the two vacant chairs, one on each side of him. His three sons and Balbus completed the party. Writing materials had been arranged round the table, after the fashion of a ghostly banquet: the butler had evidently bestowed much thought on the grim device. Sheets of quarto paper, each flanked by a pen on one side and a pencil on the other, represented the plates--penwipers did duty for rolls of bread--while ink-bottles stood in the places usually occupied by wine-glasses. The _pièce de resistance_ was a large green baize bag, which gave forth, as the old man restlessly lifted it from side to side, a charming jingle, as of innumerable golden guineas.