"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