Cecil seemed to have recovered something of his normal good humour; and his face betrayed almost a grin of amusement as he replied:
“Oh, yes! We’ve got a family ghost—or so the country-folk say. I’ve never come across it myself; but it’s common talk that the family spectre is a White Man who walks in the woods just before the head of the family dies. All rot, you know. Nobody believes in it, really. But it’s quite an old-established tradition round about here.”
Sir Clinton laughed.
“You certainly don’t seem to take him very seriously. What about Family Curses? Are you well supplied?”
“You’d better apply to Maurice if you’re keen on Family Curses. He seems to have specialized in that branch, if you ask me.”
“How time flies!” said Joan Chacewater, in mock despondency. “To-night I’m in my prime. To-morrow I shall be twenty-one, with all my bright youth behind me. Five years after that, I shall quite possibly be married to Michael here, if I’m still alive and he hasn’t died in the meantime. Then I shall sit o’ nights darning his socks in horn-rimmed spectacles, and sadly recalling those glad days when I was young and still happy. It’s dreadful! I feel I want to cry over it. Give me something to cry into, Michael; I seem to have mislaid my bag.”
Michael Clifton obligingly held out a handkerchief. Joan looked at it disparagingly.
“Haven’t you anything smaller than that? It discourages me. I’m not going to cry on a manufacturing scale. It wouldn’t be becoming.”
Una Rainhill laid her cigarette down on the ashtray beside her.
“If you’re going to be as particular as all that, Joan, I think I’d be content with a gulp or two of emotion or perhaps a lump in the throat. Cheer up! You’ve one more night before the shadows fall.”
“Ah, there it is!” said Joan, tragically. “You’re young, Una, and you never had any foresight, anyway. But I can see it all coming. I can see the fat ankles”—she glanced down at her own slim ones—“and the artificial silk stockings at three-and-eleven the pair; because Michael’s business will always be mismanaged, with him at the head of it. And I’ll have that red nose that comes from indigestion; because after Michael ends up in bankruptcy, we won’t be able to keep a maid, and I never could cook anything whatever. And then Michael will grow fat, and short of breath, and bald . . .”
“That’ll be quite enough for the present,” interrupted the outraged Michael. “I’m not so sure about letting you marry me at all, after that pleasant little sketch.”
“If you can’t drop those domineering ways of yours, Michael, I shall withdraw,” Joan warned him, coldly. “You can boss other people as much as you choose; I rather like to see you doing it. But it doesn’t go with me, remember. If you show these distressing signs of wanting your own way, I shall simply have to score you off my list of possibles. And that would no doubt be painful to both of us—to you, at any rate.”
“Oh, to both of us, to both of us, I’m sure. I wouldn’t dream of contradicting you, Joan. Where would you be, if the only serious candidate dropped out? Anything rather than that.”
“Well, it’s a blessing that one man seems to have some sense,” Joan admitted, turning to the others. “One can’t help liking Michael, if it’s only for the frank way he acknowledges when he’s in the wrong. Skilful handling does a lot with the most unpromising material, of course.”
Cecil leaned over in his chair and peered athwart the greenery which surrounded the nook in the winter-garden in which they were sitting.
“There’s Foxy wandering round.”
He raised his voice:
“Are you looking for us, Foxy? We’re over here.”
Foxton Polegate’s freckled face, surmounted by a shock of reddish hair, appeared at the entrance to their recess.
“Been hunting about for you,” he explained as he sat down. “Couldn’t make out where you’d got to.”
He turned to Joan.
“Dropped across this evening on important business. Fact is, I’ve lost my invitation-card and the book of words. Didn’t read it carefully when it came. So thought I’d drop over and hear what’s what. Programme, I mean, and all that sort of thing, so there’ll be no hitch.”
Una leaned over and selected a fresh cigarette from the box.
“You’re hopeless, Foxy,” she pronounced. “One of these memory courses is what you need badly. Why not treat the thing as a practical joke instead of in earnest? Then you’d have no difficulty. Jokes are the only things you ever seem to take seriously.”
“Epigrams went completely out before you were born, Una,” Foxy retorted. “Don’t drag ’em from their graves at this hour of the century. And don’t interrupt Joan in her instructions to the guest of the evening. Don’t you see she’s saying ’em over nervously to herself for fear she forgets ’em?”
