It was from him, saying he had been obliged to leave Wilderleigh suddenly on urgent business, and asking that his baggage might be sent after him." Hester raised her eyes slightly, as if words failed her.

Sybell's conversation always interested her.
"Perhaps the reason she is never told anything," she said to herself, "is because the ground the confidence would cover is invariably built over already by a fiction of her own which it would not please her to see destroyed." "Who would have thought," continued Sybell, "that he would have behaved in that way because I was one little half-hour late.

And of course the pretext of urgent business is too transparent, because there is no Sunday post, and the telegraph-boy had not been up.

I asked that.

And he was so anxious to finish the sketch.