When they returned to the drawing-room there was no sign of John.

‘Hasn’t your father come in?’ she asked Ethel in a low voice; Milly was still singing.

‘No, mother, I thought he was with you in the garden.’  The girl seemed to respond to Leonora’s inquietude.

Milly finished her song, and Twemlow, who had stationed himself behind her to look at the music, nodded an austere approval.

‘You have an excellent voice,’ he remarked, ‘and you can use it.’  To Leonora this judgment seemed weighty and decisive.

‘Mr. Twemlow,’ said the girl, smiling her satisfaction, ’excuse me asking, but are you married?’

‘No,’ he answered, ‘are you?’

‘Mr. Twemlow!’ she giggled, and turning to Ethel, who in anticipation blushed once again:  ‘There!  I told you.’

‘You girls are very curious,’ Leonora said perfunctorily.

Bessy came in and set a Moorish stool before the Chesterfield, on the stool an inlaid Sheraton tray with china and a copper kettle droning over a lamp, and near it a cakestand in three storeys.  And Leonora, manoeuvring her bangles, commenced the ritual of refection with Harry as acolyte.  ‘If he doesn’t come—­well, he doesn’t come,’ she thought of her husband, as she smiled interrogatively at Arthur Twemlow, holding a lump of sugar aloft in the tongs.

‘The Reverend Simon Quain asked who you were, at dinner to-day,’ said Harry.  During the absence of Leonora and her guest, Harry had evidently acquired information concerning Arthur.

‘Oh, Mr. Twemlow!’ Milly appealed quickly, ’do tell Harry and Ethel what Dr. Talmage said to you.  I think it’s so funny—­I can’t do the accent.’

‘What accent?’ he laughed.

She hesitated, caught.  ‘Yours,’ she replied boldly.

‘Very amusing!’ Harry said judicially, after the episode of the Brooklyn collection had been related.  ’Talmage must be a caution....  I suppose you’re staying at the Five Towns Hotel?’ he inquired, with an implication in his voice that there was no other hotel in the district fit for the patronage of a man of the world.  Twemlow nodded.

‘What!  At Knype?’ Leonora exclaimed.  ‘Then where did you dine to-day?’

‘I had dinner at the Tiger, and not a bad dinner either,’ he said.

‘Oh dear!’ Harry murmured, indicating an august sympathy for Arthur Twemlow in affliction.

’If I had only known—­I don’t know what I was thinking of not to ask you to come here for dinner,’ said Leonora.  ’I made sure you would be engaged somewhere.’

‘Fancy you eating all alone at the Tiger, on Sunday too!’ remarked Milly.

‘Tut! tut!’ Twemlow protested, with a farcical exactness of pronunciation; and Ethel laughed.

‘What are you laughing at, my dear?’ Leonora asked mildly.

‘I don’t know, mother—­really I don’t.’  Whereupon they all laughed together and a state of absolute intimacy was established.