for a single instant.  Finally, she had missed Mr. Candy, the doctor, who had mysteriously disappeared from the drawing-room, and had then mysteriously returned, and entered into conversation with Mr. Godfrey.  Upon the whole, things were prospering better than the experience of the dinner gave us any right to expect.  If we could only hold on for another hour, old Father Time would bring up their carriages, and relieve us of them altogether.

Everything wears off in this world; and even the comforting effect of Robinson Crusoe wore off, after Penelope left me.  I got fidgety again, and resolved on making a survey of the grounds before the rain came.  Instead of taking the footman, whose nose was human, and therefore useless in any emergency, I took the bloodhound with me.  His nose for a stranger was to be depended on.  We went all round the premises, and out into the road—­and returned as wise as we went, having discovered no such thing as a lurking human creature anywhere.

The arrival of the carriages was the signal for the arrival of the rain.  It poured as if it meant to pour all night.  With the exception of the doctor, whose gig was waiting for him, the rest of the company went home snugly, under cover, in close carriages.  I told Mr. Candy that I was afraid he would get wet through.  He told me, in return, that he wondered I had arrived at my time of life, without knowing that a doctor’s skin was waterproof.  So he drove away in the rain, laughing over his own little joke; and so we got rid of our dinner company.

The next thing to tell is the story of the night.

CHAPTER XI

When the last of the guests had driven away, I went back into the inner hall and found Samuel at the side-table, presiding over the brandy and soda-water.  My lady and Miss Rachel came out of the drawing-room, followed by the two gentlemen.  Mr. Godfrey had some brandy and soda-water, Mr. Franklin took nothing.  He sat down, looking dead tired; the talking on this birthday occasion had, I suppose, been too much for him.

My lady, turning round to wish them good-night, looked hard at the wicked Colonel’s legacy shining in her daughter’s dress.

“Rachel,” she asked, “where are you going to put your Diamond to-night?”

Miss Rachel was in high good spirits, just in that humour for talking nonsense, and perversely persisting in it as if it was sense, which you may sometimes have observed in young girls, when they are highly wrought up, at the end of an exciting day.  First, she declared she didn’t know where to put the Diamond.  Then she said, “on her dressing-table, of course, along with her other things.”  Then she remembered that the Diamond might take to shining of itself, with its awful moony light in the dark—­and that would terrify her in the dead of night.  Then she bethought herself of an Indian cabinet which stood in her sitting-room; and instantly made up her mind to put the Indian diamond in the Indian cabinet, for the purpose of permitting two beautiful native productions to admire each other.  Having let her little flow of nonsense run on as far as that point, her mother interposed and stopped her.