“I say, it’s all U.P. now,” he said, in a dominating voice.  “What’s the time?” He was obviously too well turned out to wear a watch with evening dress.

Some one said it was “twenty-five to one.”

“Fifty to one against another dance, then,” Ronnie barked joyously.

“Unless you’ll offer yourself up as a martyr in a good cause,” suggested Nora Bailey.

“Offer myself up?  How?” Ronnie asked.

“Take ’em home in your car,” Nora said in a penetrating whisper.

“Dead the other way,” was Ronnie’s too patent excuse.

“It’s only a couple of miles through the Park, you know,” Olive Jervaise put in.  “You might easily run them over to the vicarage and be back again in twenty minutes.”

“By Jove; yes.  So I might,” Ronnie acknowledged.  “That is, if I may really come back, Miss Jervaise.  Awfully good of you to suggest it.  I didn’t bring my man with me, though.  I’ll have to go and wind up the old buzz-wagon myself, if your fellow can’t be found.  Do you think ... could any one...”

He was looking round, searching for some one who was not there.

“Want any help?” Hughes asked.

“No, thanks.  That’s all right.  I know where the car is, I mean,” Ronnie said, and still hesitated as if he were going to finish the question he had begun in his previous speech.

Olive Jervaise anticipated, I think wrongly, his remark.  “They’re in the drawing-room,” she said.  “Will you tell them?”

“Better get the car round first, hadn’t I?” Ronnie asked.

The sandy Atkinson youth found an answer for that.  He cleared his long, thin throat huskily and said, “Might save time to tell ’em first.  They’d be ready, then, when you came round.”  His two equally sandy sisters clucked their approval.

“All serene,” Ronnie agreed.

He was on the bottom step of the stairs when the Hall door was thrown wide open and Frank Jervaise returned.

He stood there a moment, posed for us, searching the ladder of our gallery; and the spirit of the night-stock drifted past him and lightly touched us all as it fled up the stairs.  Then he came across the Hall, and addressing his sister, asked, in a voice that overstressed the effect of being casual, “I say, Olive, you don’t happen to know where Brenda is, do you?”

I suppose our over-soul knew everything in that minute.  A tremor of dismay ran up our ranks like the sudden passing of a cold wind.  Every one was looking at Ronnie.

Olive Jervaise’s reply furnished an almost superfluous corroboration.  She could not control her voice.  She tried to be as casual as her brother, and failed lamentably.  “Brenda was here just now,” she said.  “She—­she must be somewhere about.”

Ronnie, still the cynosure of the swarm, turned himself about and stared at Frank Jervaise.  But it was Gordon Hughes who demonstrated his power of quick inference and response, although in doing it he overstepped the bounds of decency by giving a voice to our suspicions.