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Lord Marshmoreton's fingers relaxed their hold. Throughout the rose-garden hundreds of spared thrips went on with their morning meal, unwitting of doom averted. "Oh, all right, all right, all right! Come into the library." "Very well, Lord Marshmoreton." Miss Faraday turned to Lady Caroline. "I have been looking up the trains, Lady Caroline. The best is the twelve-fifteen.
Thrips feed on the underside of rose leaves, sucking their juice and causing them to turn yellow; and Lord Marshmoreton's views on these things were so rigid that he would have poured whale-oil solution on his grandmother if he had found her on the underside of one of his rose leaves sucking its juice.
Like Lady Caroline and Lord Belpher and Keggs, the butler, he had been completely overwhelmed by Lord Marshmoreton's dramatic announcement. The situation had come upon him unheralded by any warning, and had found him unequal to it. A choking sound suddenly proceeded from the whiteness that was Maud. In the stillness it sounded like some loud noise. It jarred on George's disturbed nerves.
The people you were lunching with," she explained. "They're leaving." "That's all right. I said good-bye to them." He looked at Lord Marshmoreton. It seemed a suitable opportunity to break the news. "I was lunching with Mr. and Mrs. Byng," he said. Nothing appeared to stir beneath Lord Marshmoreton's tanned forehead. "Reggie Byng and his wife, Lord Marshmoreton," added George.
She had even contrived to smile. But now, with the final automobile whirring homewards, she had thrown off the mask. The very furniture of Lord Marshmoreton's study seemed to shrink, seared by the flame of her wrath. As for Lord Marshmoreton himself, he looked quite shrivelled. It had not been an easy matter to bring her erring brother to bay.
"There is ah just one other thing," said Lord Marshmoreton. He coughed again. He felt embarrassed. "Just just one other thing," he repeated. The reason for Lord Marshmoreton's visit to George had been twofold. In the first place, Lady Caroline had told him to go. That would have been reason enough.
It was Lord Marshmoreton's habit, when he awoke after one of his naps too late to resume work, to throw out some vague promise of "attending to it tomorrow"; but, he reflected bitterly, the girl ought to have tact and sense to understand that this was only polite persiflage, and not to be taken literally.
"Perhaps it would be as well if you said nothing about this to any of your friends." In Lord Marshmoreton's study a council of three was sitting in debate. The subject under discussion was that other note which George had written and so ill-advisedly entrusted to one whom he had taken for a guileless gardener.
In the days which followed Lord Marshmoreton's visit to George at the cottage, not a few of the occupants of Belpher Castle had their mettle sternly tested in this respect; and it is a pleasure to be able to record that not one of them failed to come through the ordeal with success.
Lord Marshmoreton had selected the same moment as herself for paying a call upon George Bevan. Maud tiptoed away, and hurried back to the castle. Never before had she so clearly realized what a handicap an adhesive family can be to a young girl. At the moment of Lord Marshmoreton's arrival, George was reading a letter from Billie Dore, which had come by that morning's post.
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