and Hannah Budge and Chloe, who had heard Beryl's
glad cry in the kitchen.

At close range the dilapidated Ford looked even more dilapidated; Robin,
letting her royal companion talk terms of payment with the bewhiskered
scion of the Forgotten Village, clambered out the moment the car stopped
and fell into Beryl's arms. From their shelter, after the briefest
instant, she lifted her face to greet her guardian and found him staring
at the Queen in a sort of stupid unbelief.

"I brought--" Robin started an introduction, but did not finish. For,
recovering, with an obvious effort, his natural manner of politeness,
her guardian was hurrying down the steps to the little car.

"Madame Forsyth, I did not expect--"

CHAPTER XXIV

MADAME FORSYTH COMES HOME

"No. I judge from all your faces no one expected me!" exclaimed Madame
Forsyth coldly, extending to Cornelius Allendyce the tips of her
fingers. "Harkness, you look as though you were seeing a ghost!"

Her rebuking words had the effect of galvanizing poor Harkness' limbs to
action--but not his tongue. Though he hobbled down the steps and took
the bag from the lawyer's hand, not a word could he speak from sheer
stupefaction.

And Hannah Budge so forgot her long years of loyalty to the House of
Forsyth as to cry out--"Oh, Miss Robin!" before so much as one word of
greeting for Madame Forsyth.

"You could 'a clean knocked me over," she explained to Harkness
afterward, "Our Madame going away as fine as you please with that
baggage of a Florrie who was as full of tricks as a cat after a mouse,
and coming back in that old car that had moss on it, I do believe, and
with Miss Robin, too, who they all thought was lost though _I_ knew
better. Something _told_ me to beat up that cake yesterday!"

"And Miss Robin didn't know Madame was Madame," explained Harkness, his
face perplexed. "She and Miss Beryl here've been thinking she was some
mysterious lydy or other--Williams says they got it in their little
heads she was a Queen hiding--"

"Madame hiding _where_?" snorted Budge.

"Well, _I_ can't make nothing out of it. My head goes 'round in a circle
like. Only Williams says that lydy must be the lydy the young lydies
visited, mysterious like, just afore Christmas and the lydy's our Madame
all right and that's what I say my head goes 'round in a circle!"

"Your tongue, too, Timothy Harkness. Well, there's lots going to happen
now, or my name ain't Hannah Budge. First