I joined young Turnbull.

“Good idea of yours, Melhuish,” Ronnie said.

Frank grunted.

“I’ve no sort of grounds for it, you know,” I explained.  “It was only a casual suggestion.”

“Jolly convincing one, though,” Turnbull congratulated me.  “So exactly the sort of thing she would do, isn’t it, Frank?”

“Shouldn’t have thought she’d have been gone so long,” Jervaise replied.  He looked at me as he continued, “And how does it fit with that notion of ours about Miss Banks having expected her?”

“That was only a guess,” I argued.

“Better evidence for it than you had for your guess,” he returned, and we drifted into an indeterminate wrangle, each of us defending his own theory rather because he had had the glory of originating it than because either of us had, I think, the least faith in our explanations.

It was Ronnie who, picking up the thread of our deductions from the Home Farm interview in the course of our discussion, sought to reconcile us and our theories.

“She might have meant to go up to the Farm,” he suggested, “and changed her mind when she got outside.  Nothing very unlikely in that.”

“But why the devil should she have made an appointment at the Home Farm in the first instance?” Frank replied with some cogency.

“If she ever did,” I put in unwisely, thereby provoking a repetition of the evidence afforded by Miss Banks’s behaviour, particularly the damning fact that she, alone, had responded to Racquet’s demand for our instant annihilation.

And while we went on with our pointless arguments and the other little group of three continued to lay plans for the re-education of Brenda, the depression of a deeper and deeper ennui weighed upon us all.  The truth is, I think, that we were all waiting for the possibility of the runaway’s return, listening for the sound of the car, and growing momentarily more uneasy as no sound came.  No doubt the Jervaises were all very sleepy and peevish, and the necessity of restraining themselves before Turnbull and myself added still another to their many sources of irritation.

I put the Jervaises apart in this connection, because Ronnie was certainly very wide awake and I had no inclination whatever to sleep.  My one longing was to get back, alone, into the night.  I was fretting with the fear that the dawn would have broken before I could get away.  I had made up my mind to watch the sunrise from “Jervaise Clump.”

It was Mrs. Jervaise who started the break-up of the party.  She was attacked by a craving to yawn that gradually became irresistible.  I saw the incipient symptoms of the attack and watched her with a sympathetic fascination, as she clenched her jaw, put her hand up to her lips, and made little impatient movements of her head and body.  I knew that it must come at last, and it did, catching her unawares in the middle of a sentence—­undertaken, I fancy, solely as a defence against the insidious craving that was obsessing her.