There was no answer.
"'That miserable girl has gone off again,' said Ethelbertha.

'What a terrible misfortune it is for her.

It's quite a disease.' "Ethelbertha wanted me to go to Sandgate camp and inquire for her.

I was sorry for the girl myself, but the picture of a young and innocent-looking man wandering about a complicated camp, inquiring for a lost domestic, presenting itself to my mind, I said that I'd rather not.
"Ethelbertha thought me heartless, and said that if I would not go she would go herself.

I replied that I thought one female member of my household was enough in that camp at a time, and requested her not to.
Ethelbertha expressed her sense of my inhuman behaviour by haughtily declining to eat any lunch, and I expressed my sense of her unreasonableness by sweeping the whole meal into the grate, after which Ethelbertha suddenly developed exuberant affection for the cat (who didn't want anybody's love, but wanted to get under the grate after the lunch), and I became supernaturally absorbed in the day-before-yesterday's newspaper.
"In the afternoon, strolling out into the garden, I heard the faint cry of a female in distress.