Mrs. Tams, forgetting she was a parlour-maid, vociferated in amazement and protest—­

“Not be in for tea, ma’am?  And him as he is!” All her lately gathering suspicions were strengthened and multiplied.

Rachel had to continue as she had begun:  “He’s been called away on very urgent business.  He simply had to go.”

Mrs. Tams, intermitting her duties, stood still and gazed at Rachel.

“Was it far, ma’am, as he had for to go?”

A simple question, and yet how difficult to answer plausibly!

“Yes—­rather.”

“I suppose he’ll be back to-night, ma’am?”

“Oh yes, of course!” replied Rachel, in absurd haste.  “But if he isn’t, I’m not to worry, he said.  But he fully expects to be.  We scarcely had time to talk, you see.  He was getting ready when I came in.”

“A telegram, ma’am, I suppose it was?”

“Yes....  That is, I don’t know whether there was a telegram first, or not.  But he was called for, you see.  A cab.  I couldn’t have let him go off walking, not as he is.”

Mrs. Tarns gave a gesture.

“I suppose I mun alter this ’ere table, then,” said she, putting a cup and saucer back on the tray.

“Idiot!  Idiot!” Rachel described herself to herself, when Mrs. Tams, very much troubled, had left the room. “’By the way, I was forgetting’—­couldn’t I have told her better than that?  She’s known for a week that there’s been something wrong, and now she’s certainly guessed there’s something dreadfully wrong....  Just look at all the silly lies I’ve told already!  What will it be like to-morrow—­and Monday?  I wonder what my face looked like while I was telling her!”

She rushed upstairs to discover what luggage Louis had taken with him.  But apparently he had taken nothing whatever.  The trunk, the valise, and the various bags were all stacked in the empty attic, exactly as she had placed them.  He must have gone off in a moment, without any reflection or preparation.

And when Mrs. Tams served the solitary tea, Rachel was just as idiotic as before.

“By the way, Mrs. Tams,” she began again, “did you happen to tell Mr. Fores where I’d gone this afternoon?...  You see, we’d no opportunity to discuss anything,” she added, striving once more after verisimilitude.

“Yes’m.  I told him when I took him his early cup o’ tea.”

“Did he ask you?”

“Now ye puzzle me, ma’am!  I couldn’t swear to it to save my life.  But I told him.”

“What did he say?” Rachel tried to smile.

“He didna say aught.”

Rachel remained alone, to objurgate Rachel.  It was indeed only too obvious from Mrs. Tams’s constrained and fussy demeanour that the old woman had divined the existence of serious trouble in the Fores household.

III