dently been thought out, but it might have struck you that the old portraits took it in with a sterner stare, with a fixedness indeed in which a visitor more sensitive would have read a consciousness of his remaining, in their presence, so jauntily, so vulgarly covered. He had never a glance for them, and it would have been easy after a minute to see that this was an old story between them. Their manner, as it were, sensibly increased the coolness. This coolness became a high rigour as Mr. Prodmore encountered, from the very threshold, a disappointment.
"No one here?" he indignantly demanded.
"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
