Page:Quiller-Couch--Old fires and profitable ghosts.djvu/277

Rh in very cheerful mind, and found Miss Wilhelmina alone at the table.

"Uncle Peter," she explained, "rarely comes down before mid-day; and Uncle Melchior breakfasts in his room. He is busy with the accounts."

"So early?"

She smiled rather sadly. "They take a deal of disentangling."

She asked how my ankle did. When I told her, and added that I must catch an early train back to Aber, she merely said, "I will walk to the station with you, if I may."

And so at ten o'clock—after I had bidden farewell to Uncle Melchior, who wore the air of one interrupted in a long sum of compound addition—we set forth. I knew the child had something on her mind, and waited. Once, by a ruinous fountain where a stone Triton blew patiently at a conch-shell plugged with turf, she paused and dug at the mortared joints of the basin with the point of her sunshade; and I thought the confidence was coming. But it was by the tumble-down gate at the end of the chestnut avenue that she turned and faced me.

"I knew you yesterday at once," she said. "You write novels."

"I wish," said I feebly, "the public were as quick at discovering me."

"Somebody printed an 'interview' with you in 's Magazine a month or two ago."

"There was not the slightest resemblance."