“Yes, it’s your turn, you pretty doll.  You’ve got to go through it!  You won’t look so young and pretty when they have done with you in the witness-box.  Bah!”

Jenny Prask was a strenuous hater.  She drew back her foot to kick the unconscious girl as she lay at her feet upon the floor.  But that insult Millie Splay was in time to prevent.

“Jenny,” she cried sharply from the balustrade of the landing.

Jenny was once more the quiet, respectful maid.

“Yes, my lady.  You want me?  I am afraid that Miss Whitworth has fainted.”

CHAPTER XXX

A REVOLUTION IN SIR CHICHESTER

Upon that house which had yesterday rung with joyous life now fell gloom and sorrow and grave disquiet.  Millie Splay drew Miranda, Dennis Brown and Harold Jupp aside.

“You three had better go,” she said.  “You have such a little time for holidays now; and I can always telegraph for you if you should be wanted.”

Miranda bubbled into little sympathetic explosions.

“Oh, Millie, I’ll stay, of course.  These boys can go.  But Joan will want some one.”

Millie, however, would not hear of it.

“You’re a brick, Miranda.  But I have ordered the car for you all immediately after luncheon.  Joan’s in bed, and wants to see no one.  She seems heartbroken.  She will say nothing.  I can’t understand her.”

There was only one at Rackham Park who did, and to him Millie Splay turned instinctively.

“I should like you to stay, if you will put up with us.  I think Chichester feels at a loss, and he likes you very much.”

“Of course I’ll stay,” replied Hillyard.

Mr. Albany Todd drifted away to the more congenial atmosphere of a dowager duchess’s dower-house in the Highlands, where it is to be hoped that his conversational qualities were more brilliantly displayed than in the irreverent gaiety of Rackham.  Millie Splay meant to keep Harry Luttrell too.  She hoped against hope.  This was the man for her Joan, and whether he was wasting his leave miserably in that melancholy house troubled her not one jot.

“It would be so welcome to me if you would put off your departure,” she said.  “I am sure there is some dreadful misunderstanding.”

Luttrell consented willingly to stay, and they went into the library, where Sir Chichester was brooding over the catastrophe with his head in his hands and the copy of the Harpoon on the floor beside him.

“No, I can’t make head or tail of it,” he said, and Harper the butler came softly into the room, closing the door from the hall.

“There’s a reporter from the West Sussex Advertiser, sir, asking to see you,” he said, and Sir Chichester raised his head, like an old hunter which hears a pack of hounds giving tongue in the distance.

“Where is he?”

“In the hall, sir.”