Part 31

The young lady, on his withdrawal, recovered herself sufficiently to rise again. “It was my train, papa--so very awfully behind. I walked up, you know, also, from the station--there’s such a lovely footpath across the park.”

“You’ve been roaming the country then alone?” Mr. Prodmore inquired.

The girl protested with instant eagerness against any such picture. “Oh, dear no, not alone!” She spoke, absurdly, as if she had had a train of attendants; but it was an instant before she could complete the assurance. “There were ever so many people about.”

“Nothing is more possible than that there should be too many!” said her father, speaking as for his personal convenience, but presenting that as enough. “But where, among them all,” he demanded, “is your trusty maid?”

Cora’s reply made up in promptitude what it lacked in felicity. “I didn’t bring her.” She looked at the old portraits as if to appeal to them to help her to remember why. Apparently indeed they gave a sign, for she presently went on: “She was so extremely unwell.”

Mr. Prodmore met this with reprobation. “Wasn’t she to understand from the first that we don’t permit----”

“Anything of that sort?”--the girl recalled it at least as a familiar law. “Oh, yes, papa--I thought she did.”

“But she doesn’t?”--Mr. Prodmore pressed the point. Poor Cora, at a loss again, appeared to wonder if the point had better be a failure of brain or of propriety, but her companion continued to press. “What on earth’s the matter with her?”

She again communed with their silent witnesses. “I really don’t quite know, but I think that at Granny’s she eats too much.”

“I’ll soon put an end to that!” Mr. Prodmore returned with decision. “You expect then to pursue your adventures quite into the night--to return to Bellborough as you came?”

The girl had by this time begun a little to find her feet. “Exactly as I came, papa dear,--under the protection of a new friend I’ve just made, a lady whom I met in the train and who is also going back by the 6.19. She was, like myself, on her way to this place, and I expected to find her here.”

Mr. Prodmore chilled on the spot any such expectations. “What does she want at this place?”

Cora was clearly stronger for her new friend than for herself. “She wants to see it.”

Mr. Prodmore reflected on this complication. “Today?” It was practically presumptuous. “Today won’t do.”

“So I suggested,” the girl declared. “But do you know what she said?”

“How should I know,” he coldly demanded, “what a nobody says?”

But on this, as if with the returning taste of a new strength, his daughter could categorically meet him. “She’s not a nobody. She’s an American.”

Mr. Prodmore, for a moment, was struck: he embraced the place, instinctively, in a flash of calculation. “An American?”

“Yes, and she’s wild----”

He knew all about that. “Americans mostly are!”

“I mean,” said Cora, “to see this place. ‘Wild’ was what she herself called it--and I think she also said she was ‘mad.’”

“She gave”--Mr. Prodmore reviewed the affair--“a fine account of herself! But she won’t do.”

The effect of her new acquaintance on his companion had been such that she could, after an instant, react against this sentence. “Well, when I told her that this particular day perhaps wouldn’t, she said it would just have to.”

“Have to do?” Mr. Prodmore showed again, through a chink, his speculative eye. “For what, then, with such grand airs?”

“Why, I suppose, for what Americans want.”

He measured the quantity. “They want everything.”

“Then I wonder,” said Cora, “that she hasn’t arrived.”

“When she does arrive,” he answered, “I’ll tackle her; and I shall thank you, in future, not to take up, in trains, with indelicate women of whom you know nothing.”