§ 6
Captain Douglas struggled with the difficulties of his cousin’s handwriting.
Everybody drew together over the fragments of the dessert with an eager curiosity, and helped to weigh Lady Laxton’s rather dishevelled phrases....
§ 7
“We’ll call the principal witness,” said Mrs. Bowles at last, warming to the business. “Dick!”
“Di-ick!”
“Dick!”
The Professor got up and strolled round behind the caravan. Then he returned. “No boy there.”
“He heard!” said Mrs. Bowles in a large whisper and making round wonder-eyes.
“She says,” said Douglas, “that the chances are he’s got into the secret passages....”
The Professor strolled out to the road and looked up it and then down upon the roofs of Winthorpe-Sutbury. “No,” he said. “He’s mizzled.”
“He’s only gone away for a bit,” said Mrs. Geedge. “He does sometimes after lunch. He’ll come back to wash up.”
“He’s probably taking a snooze among the yew bushes before facing the labours of washing up,” said Mrs. Bowles. “He can’t have mizzled. You see — in there — He can’t by any chance have taken his luggage!”
She got up and clambered—with a little difficulty because of its piled-up position, into the caravan. “It’s all right,” she called out of the door. “His little parsivel is still here.”
Her head disappeared again.
“I don’t think he’d go away like this,” said Madeleine. “After all, what is there for him to go to—even if he is Lady Laxton’s missing boy....”
“I don’t believe he heard a word of it,” said Mrs. Geedge....
Mrs. Bowles reappeared, with a curious-looking brown paper parcel in her hand. She descended carefully. She sat down by the fire and held the parcel on her knees. She regarded it and her companions waggishly and lit a fresh cigarette. “Our link with Dick,” she said, with the cigarette in her mouth.
She felt the parcel, she poised the parcel, she looked at it more and more waggishly. “I wonder,” she said.
Her expression became so waggish that her husband knew she was committed to behaviour of the utmost ungentlemanliness. He had long ceased to attempt restraint in these moods. She put her head on one side and tore open the corner of the parcel just a little way.
“A tin can,” she said in a stage whisper.
She enlarged the opening. “Blades of grass,” she said.
The Professor tried to regard it humorously. “Even if you have ceased to be decent you can still be frank.... I think, now, my dear, you might just straightforwardly undo the parcel.”
She did. Twelve unsympathetic eyes surveyed the evidences of Bealby’s utter poverty.
“He’s coming,” cried Madeleine suddenly.
Judy repacked hastily, but it was a false alarm.
“I said he’d mizzled,” said the Professor.
“And without washing up!” wailed Madeleine, “I couldn’t have thought it of him....”
§ 8
But Bealby had not “mizzled,” although he was conspicuously not in evidence about the camp. There was neither sight nor sound of him for all the time they sat about the vestiges of their meal. They talked of him and of topics arising out of him, and whether the captain should telegraph to Lady Laxton, “Boy practically found.” “I’d rather just find him,” said the captain, “and anyhow until we get hold of him we don’t know it’s her particular boy.” Then they talked of washing-up and how detestable it was. And suddenly the two husbands, seeing their advantage, renewed their proposals that the caravanners should put up at the golflinks hotel, and have baths and the comforts of civilization for a night or so—and anyhow walk thither for tea. And as William had now returned—he was sitting on the turf afar off smoking a nasty-looking short clay pipe—they rose up and departed. But Captain Douglas and Miss Philips for some reason did not go off exactly with the others, but strayed apart, straying away more and more into a kind of solitude....
First the four married people and then the two lovers disappeared over the crest of the downs....