fascination, as she clenched her jaw, put her hand up to her lips, and
made little impatient movements of her head and body. I knew that it must
come at last, and it did, catching her unawares in the middle of a
sentence--undertaken, I fancy, solely as a defence against the insidious
craving that was obsessing her.

"Oh, dear!" she said, with a mincing, apologetic gesture of her head; and
then "Dear me!" Having committed the solecism, she found it necessary to
draw attention to it. She may have been a Shropshire Norman, but at that
relaxed hour of the night, she displayed all the signs of the orthodox
genteel attitude.

"I don't know when I've been so tired," she apologised.

But, indeed, she did owe us an apology for her yawning fit affected us all
like a virulent epidemic. In a moment we were every one of us trying to
stifle the same desire, and each in our own way being overcome. I must do
Frank the justice to say that he, at least, displayed no sign of
gentility.

"Oh! Lord, mater, you've started us now," he said, and gave away almost
sensuously to his impulses, stretching and gaping in a way that positively
racked us with the longing to imitate him.

"Really, my dear, no necessity for you," began Mr. Jervaise, yawned more
or less politely behind a very white, well-kept hand, and concluded, "no
necessity for you or Olive to stay up; none whatever. We cannot, in any
case, _do_ anything until the morning."

"Even if she comes in, now," supplemented Olive.