Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/364

THE AWKWARD AGE "and so is Mr. Cashmore, and so is Tishy—voyez!—who has kept on—bless her little bare back!—no one she oughtn't to keep. As nobody else will now arrive, it would be quite cozy if she locked the door."

"But what on earth, my dear Jane," Mrs. Brook plaintively wondered, "are you proposing we should do?"

Mrs. Brook, in her apprehension, had looked expressively at their friends, but the eye of the Duchess wandered no further than Harold and Lady Fanny. "It would perhaps serve to keep that pair a little longer from escaping together."

Mrs. Brook took a pause no greater. "But wouldn't it be, as regards another pair, locking the stable door after—what do you call it? Don't Petherton and Aggie appear already to have escaped together? Mitchy, man, where in the world's your wife?"

"I quite grant you," said the Duchess gaily, "that my niece is wherever Petherton is. This I'm sure of, for there's a friendship, if you please, that has not been interrupted. Petherton's not gone, is he?" she asked in her turn of Mitchy.

But again, before he could speak, it was taken up. "Mitchy's silent, Mitchy's altered, Mitchy's queer!" Mrs. Brook declared, while the new recruits to the circle, Tishy and Nanda and Mr. Cashmore, Lady Fanny and Harold too, after a minute and on perceiving the movement of the others, ended by enlarging it, with mutual accommodation and aid, to a pleasant talkative ring in which the subject of their companion's ejaculation, on a low ottoman and glaring in his odd way in almost all directions at once, formed the conspicuous, attractive centre. Tishy was nearest Mr. Longdon, and Nanda, still flanked by Mr. Cashmore, between that gentleman and his wife, who had Harold on her other side. Edward Brookenham was neighbored by his son and by Vanderbank, who might easily have felt himself, in spite of their separation and 354