"Good Lord! no, I didn't. How do you know?" he said.

"I left my own car in the ditch, just outside the Park," Ronnie explained.
"Don't know in the least how it happened. Suppose I was thinking of
something else. Anyway, I've fairly piled her up, I'm afraid. I was coming
back from the vicarage, you know. And then, of course, I walked up here,
and Mr. Jervaise was good enough to offer me your car to get home in; and
when we went out to the garage, it had gone."

"But was it there when you went to get your own car?" Frank asked.

"I'm bothered if I know," Ronnie confessed. "I've been trying hard to
remember."

Mr. Jervaise sighed heavily and took a little stroll across to the other
side of the Hall. He seemed to me to be more perturbed and unhappy than
any of the others.

Frank stood in a good central position and scowled enormously, while his
mother, his sister, and Ronnie waited anxiously for the important decision
that he was apparently about to deliver. And they still looked to him to
find some expedient when his impending judgment had taken form in the
obvious pronouncement, "Looks as if they'd gone off together, somewhere."

"It's very dreadful," Mrs. Jervaise said; and then Olive slightly lifted
the awful flatness of the dialogue by saying,--

"We ought to have guessed. It's absurd that we let the thing go on."