Old Tabrum would quaver in from time to time to survey the comfort of his guests, regaling them with some particularly choice floral anecdote. His wife too would peep to inquire whether the roasted fowls fulfilled her expectations, and once little Polly Patch put her cap round the door and asked if his honour would like the warming-pan left in his bed or merely whisked three or four times over his already well-aired sheets.
Phyllida made a careless remark about her mother, and Sir George Repington hoped that Mrs. Courteen (Phyllida had some time ago divulged her name) would not be alarmed by the strife of the elements. Phyllida made a very careless reply to this, by reassuring Sir George about her mother, who, as she pointed out, would be not at all likely to observe the wildness of the night in her anxiety to secure her hand against the prying glances of my lady Bunbutter.
"Is that Sir Moffyn Bunbutter's lady?" said Sir George.
"Sure to be, sure to be," Sir George commented. "Who'd have thought of seeing poor old Sir Moffyn's lady here of all places?"
"But she's not here, sir. She is at Curtain Wells."
Phyllida saw her mistake, but, being unused to falsehoods, made no attempt to extricate herself from the situation provoked by her own carelessness. As a happy compromise, she blushed and made queer little excavations in the salt-cellar.
"You've no brother and your father is dead?" went on Sir George, fixing the abashed young woman with his sharp eyes. "Then you are alone in this inn?"
The statement, put so baldly, sounded very dreadful to Miss Courteen. Moreover, she had an uneasy idea that the elderly gentleman was beginning to feel himself compromised by her company, so she made patterns in the salt-cellar more fantastick than ever, blushed till the shells of her ears seemed veritably to crack in the furnace of outraged sensibility, and looked very guilty.
Phyllida's whispered 'yes' was only just audible above the languid ticking of the Dutch clock.
The antique landlord broke the tension by putting his head round the door and demanding from Sir George whether he preferred to sleep in the Dorick Summerhouse with a view of the surrounding country, or in the Green Vista with a more comfortable bed, if not so wide a view. Antiquity was followed by his wife, who hustled him fairly into the candlelight and explained that all their bedchambers were named to suit the flowery eccentricity of her husband.