"I'm sorry to say no one has come, sir," Chivers replied; "but I've had a telegram from Captain Yule."
Mr. Prodmore's apprehension flared out. "Not to say he ain't coming?"
"He was to take the 2.20 from Paddington; he certainly _should_ be here!" The old man spoke as if his non-arrival were the most unaccountable thing in the world, especially for a poor person ever respectful of the mystery of causes.
"He should have been here this hour or more. And so should my fly-away daughter!"
Chivers surrounded this description of Miss Prodmore with the deep discretion of silence, and then, after a moment, evidently reflected that silence, in a world bestrewn with traps to irreverence, might be as rash as speech. "Were they coming--a--together, sir?"
He had scarcely mended the matter, for his visitor gave an inconsequent stare. "Together?--for what do you take Miss Prodmore?" This young lady's parent glared about him again as if to alight on something else that was out of place; but the good intentions expressed in the attitude of every object might presently have been presumed to soothe his irritation. It had at any rate the effect of bridging, for poor Chivers, some of his gaps. "It _is_ in a sense true that their 'coming together,' as you call it, is exactly what I've made my plans for today: my calculation was that we should all punctually converge on this spot. Attended by her trusty maid, Miss Prodmore, who happens to be on a week's visit to her grandmother at Bellborough, was to take the 1.40 from that place. I was to drive over--ten miles--from the most convenient of my seats. Captain Yule"--the speaker wound up his statement as with the mention of the last touch in a masterpiece of his own sketching--"was finally to shake off for a few hours the peculiar occupations that engage him."
The old man listened with his head askance to favour his good ear, but his visible attention all on a sad spot in one of the half-dozen worn rugs. "They _must_ be peculiar, sir, when a gentleman comes into a property like this and goes three months without so much as a nat'ral curiosity----! I don't speak of anything but what _is_ nat'ral, sir; but there have _been_ people here----"
"There have repeatedly been people here!" Mr. Prodmore complacently interrupted.