A door snapped to; then another.  The car shot violently forward, with shrieks and a huge buzzing noise, and leaped up the slope of the street.  Rachel, still in the porch, could see Mr. Batchgrew’s head wagging rather helplessly from side to side, just above the red speck of the tail-lamp.  Then the whole vision was swiftly blotted out, and the warning shrieks of the invisible car grew fainter on the way to Red Cow.  It pleased Rachel to think of the old man being casually bullied and shaken by John’s Ernest.

She leaned forward and gazed down the street, not up it.  When she turned into the house Mrs. Maldon was descending the stairs, which, being in a line with the lobby, ended opposite the front door.  Judging by the fixity of the old lady’s features, Rachel decided that she was not yet quite pardoned for the slight she had put upon the memory of her employer.  So she smiled pleasantly.

“Don’t close the front door, dear,” said Mrs. Maldon stiffly.  “There’s some one there.”

Rachel looked round.  She had actually, in sheer absent-mindedness or negligence or deafness, been shutting the door in the face of the telegraph-boy!

“Oh, dear!  I do hope—!” Mrs. Maldon muttered as she hastily tugged at the envelope.

Having read the message, she passed it on to Rachel, and at the same time forgivingly responded to her smile.  The excitement of the telegram had sufficed to dissipate Mrs. Maldon’s trifling resentment.

Rachel read—­

“Train hour late.  Julian.”

The telegraph boy was dismissed:  “No answer, thank you.”

X

During the next half-hour excitement within the dwelling gradually increased.  It grew out of nothing—­out of Mrs. Maldon’s admirable calm in receiving the message of the telegram—­until it affected like an atmospheric disturbance the ground floor—­the sitting-room where Mrs. Maldon was spending nervous force in the effort to preserve an absolutely tranquil mind, the kitchen where Rachel was “putting back” the supper, the lobby towards which Rachel’s eye and Mrs. Maiden’s ear were strained to catch any sign of an arrival, and the unlighted, unused room behind the sitting-room which seemed to absorb and even intensify the changing moods of the house.

The fact was that Mrs. Maldon, in her relief at finding that Julian was not killed or maimed for life in a railway accident, had begun by treating a delay of one hour in all her arrangements for the evening as a trifle.  But she had soon felt that, though a trifle, it was really very upsetting and annoying.  It gave birth to irrational yet real forebodings as to the non-success of her little party.  It meant that the little party had “started badly.”  And then her other grand-nephew, Louis Fores, did not arrive.  He had been invited for supper at seven, and should have appeared at five minutes to seven at the latest.  But at five minutes to seven