doctors agree in ordering me con idance of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise." announced Framton, who ed under the tolerably wide-spread delusion that total strangers and chance uaintances are hungry for the least detail of one's ailments and infirmities, their cause nd cure. "On the matter of diet they are not so much in agreement," he continued.
No?" said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the last moment. Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention-but not to what Framton was saying.
Here they are at last!" she cried. "Just in time for tea, and don't they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!"
Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look intended to convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring out through the open window with dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock of nameless fear Framton swung round in his seat and looked in the same direction.
In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn towards the window; they all carried guns under their arms, and one of them was additionally burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders. A tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels. Noiselessly they neared the house, and then a hoarse young voice chanted out of the dusk: "Isaid, Bertie, why do you bound?"
Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall-door, the gravel-drive, and the front gate were dimly noted stages in his headlong retreat. A cyclist coming along the road had torun into the hedge to avoid imminent collision.
"Here we are, my dear," said the bearer of the white mackintosh, coming in through the window, "fairly muddy, but most of it's dry. Who was that who bolted out as we came up?"
"A most extraordinary man, a Mr. Nuttel," said Mrs. Sappleton; "could only talk about his illnesses and dashed off without a word of good-bye or apology when you arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost."
Texpect it was the spaniel," said the niece calmly, "he told me he had a horror of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of Periah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling grining and foaming just above him. Enough to make anyone lose their nerve"
Romance at short notice was her speciality