you know. And then, of course, I walked up here,
and Mr. Jervaise was good enough to offer me your car to get home in; and
when we went out to the garage, it had gone."

"But was it there when you went to get your own car?" Frank asked.

"I'm bothered if I know," Ronnie confessed. "I've been trying hard to
remember."

Mr. Jervaise sighed heavily and took a little stroll across to the other
side of the Hall. He seemed to me to be more perturbed and unhappy than
any of the others.

Frank stood in a good central position and scowled enormously, while his
mother, his sister, and Ronnie waited anxiously for the important decision
that he was apparently about to deliver. And they still looked to him to
find some expedient when his impending judgment had taken form in the
obvious pronouncement, "Looks as if they'd gone off together, somewhere."

"It's very dreadful," Mrs. Jervaise said; and then Olive slightly lifted
the awful flatness of the dialogue by saying,--

"We ought to have guessed. It's absurd that we let the thing go on."

"One couldn't be sure," her mother protested.

"If you're going to wait till you're sure, of course..." Frank remarked
brutally, with a shrug of his eyebrows that effectively completed his
sentence.

"It was so impossible to believe that she would do a thing like that," his
mother complained.

"Point is, what's to be done now," Ronnie said. "By gad, if I catch that
chap, I'll wring his neck."

Mr. Jervaise, who was taking a lonely promenade up and down the far side
of the Hall, looked up more hopefully at this threat.

"Oh! we can _catch_ him," Frank commented. "He has stolen the car, for one
thing..." his inflection implied that catching Banks might be only the
beginning of the trouble.

"Well, once we've got him," returned Ronnie hopefully.

"Don't be an ass," Frank snubbed him. "We can't advertise it all over the
county that he has gone off with Brenda."

"I don't see..." Ronnie began, but Mrs. Jervaise interrupted him.

"It was so unfortunate that the Atkinsons should have been here," she
remarked.

"Every one will know, in any case," Olive added.

Those avowals of their real and altogether desperate cause for distress
raised the emotional tone of the two Jervaise women, and for the first
time since I had come into the Hall, they looked at me with a hint of
suspicion. They made me feel that I was an outsider, who might very well
take this opportunity to withdraw.

I wa