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 was on the point of accepting the hint when Frank Jervaise dragged me into the conclave.

“What do you think, Melhuish?” he asked, and then they all turned to me as if I might be able in some miraculous way to save the situation.  Even old Jervaise paused in his melancholy pacing and waited for my answer.

“There is so little real evidence, at present,” I said, feeling their need for some loophole and searching my mind to discover one for them.

“It really does seem almost impossible that Brenda should have—­run away with that man,” Mrs. Jervaise pleaded with the beginning of a gesture that produced the effect of wanting to wring her hands.

“She’s under age, too,” Frank put in.

“Does that mean they can’t get married?” asked Ronnie.

“Not legally,” Frank said.

“It’s such madness, such utter madness,” his mother broke out in a tone between lament and denunciation.  But she pulled herself up immediately and came back to my recent contribution as presenting the one possible straw that still floated in this drowning world.  “But, as Mr. Melhuish says,” she went on with a little gasp of annoyance, “we really have very little evidence, as yet.”